I am now 100% convinced that we will attack Iran before the fall elections. I’d suspected for quite a while that the Administration wanted this, but I think we now have concrete evidence that it will happen. You may have heard, Admiral Fallon “resigned” yesterday. Galrahn points out some interesting facts at Information Dissemination.
Four star flag officers, particularly Joint Combatant Commanders, do not resign in the middle of war because of a media report. I read the Esquire article from front to back 5 times, I cannot find a single negative quote from Adm. Fallon about President Bush. I see plenty of criticism from Barnett. The implication is Bush can’t read, which is bullshit, or Fallon is being pushed out, which sounds more believable.
I might be mistaken, but I believe we are witness to Bush fire his first General/Admiral of the war. Think long and hard as you contemplate what that means.
He goes on to explain some of the background of the current political state of the military, including the split between “moderates” who desire a “cooperative” approach, and hardliners who want unilateral military action. His conclusion:
If you didn’t read the Esquire piece, or didn’t read my earlier response, you may of just missed what could in fact be a signal of war to Iran. I know one thing, if I was Iran, that is the only way to read this. There was a message for Iran in the Barnett article:
“Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys [Iran] have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.”
Are we assuming the Bush administration can’t read, Barnett is saying that, Barnett makes all the cuts at the Bush administration in the article, not Fallon. Barnett appears to have been dead right though. Reasonable people who do nothing wrong don’t quit because a reporter writes an article bad about a politician, but unreasonable people can make that person quit. I really am stunned, I have never really believed the US was going to strike Iran until today.
It’ll happen. We’ve been beating that drum for quite a while now, and Fallon has only been at his post for a year. Galrahn is right – Fallon was forced out by someone upset about the politics. That’s the only way this makes sense. And it’s a strong signal that the Administration wishes to push forward plans for war with Iran.
American prominence on the world stage has not been due to some issue of “national character”; our people are not inherently different than people anywhere else in the world. But we have, in the past, had better educational resources, and a greater emphasis on science and engineering. But no longer.
Back in September, I wrote that America is out of touch and behind the times on climate change and economic reform. It is mired in a stagnant war that the rest of the west has abandoned or is abandoning. American global influence is in decline, the country having lost the respect of allies and the credibility to lead. As we’ve seen yet again in last week’s brinkmanship by Turkey, American diplomacy has all the vim and vigour of Fred Thompson. For now America remains the world leader, but it’s moving steadily from superpower to first among equals. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sciences.
In the half-century following the second world war US universities were magnets for students and academics from around the world. Crucially, many foreign graduate students studying the physical sciences, biological sciences, IT and engineering stayed after graduation. As the Gathering Storm report notes: “Government spending on R&D soared after World War II, and … as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) reached a peak of 1.9% in 1964.” In the last six or seven years, however, that tide has turned. Overseas institutions and companies are increasingly competitive, and federal and state funding for science and engineering has fallen significantly, to just 0.8% of GDP. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are sucking up federal money, with President Bush last week asking Congress to raise the war budget for 2008 to $196bn. That’s quite an opportunity cost.
While the US is still a world leader in science and technology, the gap is closing, and rapidly. China and India crank out engineers at a rate that dwarfs ours. As we’ve documented here at Plunderbund, belief in scientific theories are alarmingly low here compared to other industrialized nations around the world. Federal research dollars – the stuff that funds core research with little immediate ROI (and thus rarely funded by private industry) are actually shrinking under the Bush Administration. One area where we remain far ahead of the rest of the world – where we spend more than everyone else combined and more than 10 times the next biggest spender – is in “defense”. That’s really the only thing keeping us afloat scientifically (and I should know – it’s how I make my living, and I see where the research dollars come from).
One interesting note from the AAAS data: the only reason the decline isn’t steeper is America’s increasing support for weapon systems development. This year’s Nobel prizes captured the mood. For the first time this century, Americans were not among those awarded the physics and chemistry prizes.
The era of American Exceptionalism is at an end. And it’s because our leaders would rather ban scientific research into stem cells and “teach the controversy” and undercut solid scientific education in our schools, rather than investing in the technology, infrastructure, and core science research necessary to keep us out in front of the rest of the world.
Wes Clark is sponsoring a campaign to dump Rush from Armed Forces Radio. Seems fitting, since he thinks a large number of our soldiers are “phony”. You can get involved here.
Maybe he was all hopped up on hillbilly heroin again, who knows. Maybe he was a Starfleet Commander once in a Star Trek club so he thinks that he “served” and has any credibility on the subject. It’s hard tellin’. It’s funny watching him spin ’round though! Now he lumps Murtha in. LOL. Good show, Rush. Good show!
The MySpace generation is a “somewhat alien life force,” a Navy recruiting presentation contends — with a language and lifestyle that’s almost unrecognizable to adults. And because the kids are such “coddled,” “narcissistic praise junkies,” they’ll be beyond tough to bring into the military. Propensity to join the armed forces among these so-called “millennials” has dropped to as little as 3%; that’s down from 26% in 2001.
“Narcissistic praise junkies?” Seems pretty accurate to me.
The Iraq war has only discouraged millennials further. Up to 32% say it has made them “less patriotic,” and up to 67% say they are “less likely to join the military.”
Big surprise. I hardly expect sane kids, much less “narcissistic praise junkies” to sign up for the Stupid Pointless War. Much less when our execution of said SPW leaves little to be proud of. (Guantanamo? Rendition? Torture?)
What a friggin’ waste of time. Senate Republicans (and possibly House Republicans as well, if Mr. Boehner gets his way) would rather waste everyone’s time passing resolutions condemning MoveOn rather than discussing stuff that’s, you know, important.
The US Senate has voted to condemn an advertisement attacking the country’s top commander in Iraq as he gave key testimony on military progress there.
In the House of Representatives, Republican leader John Boehner recommended a similar move.
But a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told The Associated Press news agency that the priorities of Americans lay elsewhere.
“The House is going to devote its full attention to providing healthcare to children… reducing global warming and responsibly redeploying US forces now in Iraq,” Nadeam Elshami said.
Heh. OK. WooPoo U was one of many beloved nicknames cadets had for West Point – probably more since I was there. The rock. The point. You get the picture. This news came back in April, but I just wandered upon it in one of those odd multi-tiered search expeditions. WP graduates are leaving at a record pace.
Now there always was a 5 and fly mentality in some. Deal was you last 4 years (very tough…just 1.5 for me), then 5 more and bail. Write your ticket in the private sector. Highly respected companies like Harley Davidson and many others hire up WooPooers like crazy and groom them for very high level jobs. It’s a good deal if you’re up for it.
The downside is we lose key leadership and it appears the policies of this administration have driven the honorable junior officer out of the service:
WASHINGTON — Recent graduates of the US Military Academy at West Point are choosing to leave active duty at the highest rate in more than three decades, a sign to many military specialists that repeated tours in Iraq are prematurely driving out some of the Army’s top young officers.
According to statistics compiled by West Point, of the 903 Army officers commissioned upon graduation in 2001, nearly 46 percent left the service last year — 35 percent at the conclusion of their five years of required service, and another 11 percent over the next six months. And more than 54 percent of the 935 graduates in the class of 2000 had left active duty by this January, the statistics show.
The reason for the exodus is the wear and tear of multiple deployments in Iraq and what must be a sinking feeling that it’s not getting much better. Let’s see IED or IBM? Duh. retired Lieutenant General Daniel Christman, a former superintendent of West Point summed it up best:
Iraq is exerting very strong influence on the career intentions of junior officers
The Iraq War is stressing our military at all levels. It is a shame to see this happening at a time when more highly trained and technically based leaders are needed. This story and the statistics coming out of West Point are what you might call a key indicator. It’s too bad all the officers are getting is lip service as it relates to drawing down in Iraq.
This puts wingnuts in a real conundrum. “Let’s see…hmmm…do I ’support our troops?’ or do I ‘hate on the illegals?’…choices, choices”:
(CBS/AP) While the U.S. military searches for a soldier missing in Iraq, kidnapped by insurgents possibly allied with al Qaeda, his wife back home in Massachusetts may be deported by the U.S. government.
Based on some things I’ve heard online (more on that later), I’m gonna bet the wingnut blogosphere in Ohio would vote to hate on illegals. “Deport the illegal bitch” is my guess on their first thought. Tough one for them though. It’s what happens when your positions aren’t morally consistent.
This post is a Matty Special, just for our friends at RABid.
It turns out that Dr. Laura’s son, who is currently deployed in Afghanistan, had a MySpace page. And what a page it was.
The soldier son of talk radio relationship counselor Laura Schlessinger is under investigation for a graphic personal Web page that one Army official has called “repulsive.”
The MySpace page, publicly available until Friday when it disappeared from the Internet, included cartoon depictions of rape, murder, torture and child molestation; photographs of soldiers with guns in their mouths; a photograph of a bound and blindfolded detainee captioned “My Sweet Little Habib”; accounts of illicit drug use; and a blog entry headlined by a series of obscenities and racial epithets.
More:
“Yes . . . F—ING Yes!!!” said one blog entry on the Schlessinger site. “I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it . . . and some that don’t.”
Nice. I’ll leave it to our readers to draw their own conclusions about Mr. Schlessinger, or his mother, and what – if anything – this news means.
I first wrote about this here. Now we learn that though your average soldier will not be able to use sites like MySpace and YouTube, the “official” military will be able to. They have yet to answer bandwidth excuses to any satisfaction and this appears to be yet more stifling of the very freedoms these kids are supposedly over there fighting and dying for.
I can fully understand not giving up operationally sensitive information, but telling it like it is from the ground level is not the same as giving up maps and plans to the terrorists. It makes you wonder what they are wanting to hide and why they are so wanting to control the message coming out of Iraq.
So now you won’t get bloggers telling you like it is, you’ll get nice little “Soft Knock” videos from the MFN-Iraq offical YouTube channel. While I don’t mind seeing those, nor learning of the resurgence of scouting in Iraq (something that surprisingly enough dates back to 1921 in the country), I still want to see what soldiers see, hear, and feel about the war.
It’s hard for me to let MNFIraq claim they are a “boots on the ground” channel while they don’t actually let the boots on the ground blog or vlog. Seems a just a wee bit off to me.
American Exceptionalism
by Brian on October 30, 2007 · Comments
American prominence on the world stage has not been due to some issue of “national character”; our people are not inherently different than people anywhere else in the world. But we have, in the past, had better educational resources, and a greater emphasis on science and engineering. But no longer.
While the US is still a world leader in science and technology, the gap is closing, and rapidly. China and India crank out engineers at a rate that dwarfs ours. As we’ve documented here at Plunderbund, belief in scientific theories are alarmingly low here compared to other industrialized nations around the world. Federal research dollars – the stuff that funds core research with little immediate ROI (and thus rarely funded by private industry) are actually shrinking under the Bush Administration. One area where we remain far ahead of the rest of the world – where we spend more than everyone else combined and more than 10 times the next biggest spender – is in “defense”. That’s really the only thing keeping us afloat scientifically (and I should know – it’s how I make my living, and I see where the research dollars come from).
The era of American Exceptionalism is at an end. And it’s because our leaders would rather ban scientific research into stem cells and “teach the controversy” and undercut solid scientific education in our schools, rather than investing in the technology, infrastructure, and core science research necessary to keep us out in front of the rest of the world.
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