...but, hey, five or ten years of pillaging will be good for USSOCOM and the burgeoning mercenary market...
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
You're so cynical, Jack!
ReplyDeleteThis is a rainbow unicorn wrapped in a magic blanket delivered by a flying pony branded "Freedom™!"
You don't hate Freedom™, do you, Jack?
(Freedom™ is jointly sponsored by Exxon and Chevron, with additional funding from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and General Electric. Unauthorized use of Freedom™ is prohibited.)
~
I must confess: I never owned any stock in Freedom™.
ReplyDeleteSo we'll structurally adjust their economy back down in line w/ African standards...They'll be getting their very own, spanking-new parliment.
ReplyDeleteThat's about the right of it, Peter. And concessions. Lots of concessions more favorable to France, England and the US.
ReplyDeleteAlso - it's just ideologically correct to break up actually socialized health and educational systems, to end oil disbursements to the population, and to prepare the ground for the rise of uranium Islamists along the border with Algeria or Chad, you know, evil dudes with the ability to sell uranium to Osama, er, Iran...
They got away with it AGAIN !
ReplyDeleteYea, you knew freedom was the top priority when the "rebels" set up their fucking central bank.
ReplyDeletejpmorgan will enjoy getting their hands on the gold and bp/exxon the oil, win:win all around. Except for the untold number of lives extinguished by usa freedom bombs...
Cripes, they set up a non-state controlled Central Bank in the first week of beginning to provide support. The oil, the water (the Great Man-Made River), all to be privatized. Ghadaffi was a monster, but what's coming to replace him isn't much better.
ReplyDeleteJake, incidentally, Qaddafi's sociopathy wasn't an issue to the Western powers a few scant years ago, when the official narrative was that Muammar was a changed man and was helping us go after al-Qaeda.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how long it will be before the rebels outlive their usefulness?
RZ,
ReplyDeleteI'd snark, "Next stop, Syria," but I'm not sure what Syria has in the way of resources.
Oh. Wait. Nevermind. It controls the too much of the River Jordan.
Jake,
My non-existent money is on freeing up that Libyan capital and an infrastructure fire sale.
JTG,
I think they're useful as long as they remain weak and incompetent enough to produce a divided country where "Islamists" begin to pose a threat, or have "seized" the uranium rich borderlands of the south.
They can always play life-football will those sub-Saharan oil workers too (sorry "mercenaries"). But I'm sure we won't hear about lynching crazes from anyone the State Dept. has designates "democratic freedom fighters". I'm sure champagne's been flowing all round Wall St. anyway.
ReplyDeleteWayne,
ReplyDeleteI'm staking my unfame on a "uranium threat." The southern borderlands of Libya are uranium country.
Yep, Syria is probably next.
ReplyDeleteLebanon is also on the hit list.
A stretch would be Nigeria.
The whole Maghreb and MENA is on the scope.
MSM is tutoring the sheeple on how all this was justified.
And how this was another move toward global democracy.
They are massaging the public to accept the next shock and awe.
RZ,
ReplyDeleteI'd bet that Lebanon is a wasp's nest no one wants to poke until the rest of the regional pieces are secured.
Hizbollah is no fucking joke.
I find it incredible that Obama pulled this shit off with such muted criticism from libs and confused lefties. He really is a slicker imperialist than George E. Neuman ever was. The semiotics of his image really do the trick.
ReplyDeleteWill "the hunt for Qadafi" be our next movie of the week, then?
Jack,
ReplyDeleteI agree about Lebanon. I also don't think the U.S. will do anything about Syria beyond more finger-wagging, especially now that al-Assad has gotten the Al-Maliki seal of approval.
W.,
Incidentally, the same libs respond just like Bush-era Repub chickenhawks when anyone expresses disagreement over Libya, too, complete with crocodile tears about atrocities both real and imagined.
Next stop Syria, Sudan and Chad (if not already). It looks like there are some nice humanitarian justifications brewing there right now.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, some insiders claim the Pentagon had a wish list for their resource wars:
"General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon]."
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2011/08/obama-implementing-neocon-plan-for-war.html
Walter, JTG,
ReplyDeleteI think our earthly lords and masters are content to let Syria resolve itself, for the time being.
Putting soldiers or bombs on the ground in Syria, at least for the cameras, is a provocation Iran cannot ignore.
And drawing Iran in, at this moment, does funny things to Russian and Chinese security agreements with that country, IIRC.
On the Tevye hand, the Sudan and Chad are ripe for the picking, with the added value of fucking up Chinese concession agreements, encircling Egypt, and giving Georgio Clooney a distracting bully pulpit for a season, or two.
One has to step back and admire Obama's audacity. There's not a Republican in the country who could have pulled it off at the exact same time as shepherding in a vasty vast austerity scheme.
I agree that Syria and Iran will probably be the last on the hit list that the U.S. will intervene in openly. They will slowly stir the propaganda pot though. But let's not forget that the U.S. is probably already engaging in war against these countries (under most definitions of "war").
ReplyDeleteI also agree that tightening U.S. noose around Africa threatens the Chinese. The only other major power that can stop the U.S. project, Russia, may not be able to do much. They certainly haven't been able to stop the Western war on Libya. Russia will especially be distracted if the "peace march", scheduled by what the Western press will surely dub the 'Georgian freedom fighters', provokes another conflict with Russia. I'm sure the U.S. would hate that.
Walter,
ReplyDeleteBush the Younger upped the Baluchi ante against Iran, I believe as far back as 2006.
Obama has doubled down, by expanding that CIA/SOCOM maneuver into Pakistan. I'm not surprised, at all, that the Chinese state views this as extraordinarily provocative.