This was war. War is not fair. War is not good, or right, or clever. It’s just war, just opposing factors abiding by arbitrary surface values and rules of engagement to achieve the ends desired by those holding the reins. Sometimes, the outcome of actions taken by an opposing factor will achieve the ends desired, and sometimes those outcomes are good–perhaps certain people live, or the accepted metric of free will is preserved. Sometimes–usually–the outcomes are mixed. That is why we don’t just go to war to make the day better, or to help a neighbor, or to spread knowledge and happiness–the outcome is usually at least partially bad. Often, as we have been told, the surface values proclaimed in a war by opposing leaders were at complete odds with what the actual actions perpetrated and the internal goals of the controlling parties truly were. Each side did what they thought would put their country in the more favorable position, a position of greater power. Each side executed brilliance and idiocy, and no boundary on a map can succinctly dictate any man or nation’s sum total, as if just taking a step over an invisible line can change an engineer’s logic, or sway a leader’s compassion, or alter fact from a distance.

Both were wrong. It was a war, even if there weren’t visible plains of battle…

OK, that’s my soapbox speech (did you hear the preach?) :D Would have been better with pictures, but you’ll have to just use your imagination (I prefer some kind of back lighting, maybe some ambient noises, evil-doer theme song when the part about contradicting ‘surface values’ comes up)… :)

Nice article, thanks for posting it for free over several years.

Just so you know, Chornobyl is in Ukraine. The Ukrainians are European … westerners. The Russians are Asians, essentially … easterners. So really they didn’t give a rip about leaving a mess for the Ukrainians to clean up. Nor do they now. Keep it in mind.

I heard it mentioned that reducing political terms would help aid in corruption crushing. That idea is nice, but changing the rules doesnt make the game any less playable. Corruption is a issue of involvement more than simply oppertunity. For example, if one were to corrupt such a system, they would simply push puppets into the government and pull their strings from a far. The biggest issue with this situation isnt just the corruption, but the security issue this posses when the real power can’t react quickly enough because of the hundreds of middle men in the system. Imagine the latency in decision making during emergency situations.

God damned commies. bloody capitalists. F’ing French! (Just because. You understand)

George tenets book came out trying to distance him from Bush’s desire to go to war with Iraq
Tenet at the time was just trying to position himself in the administration, so he was a YES man.
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Tenet,George.shtml

Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 9/11 Terrorists, Part 36:
Who Mentored Michael Hayden?
http://911review.org/Alex/Khashoggi-36_Hayden.html

Black later calculated that all he needed was $500 million of covert action funds and reasonable authorization from President Bush to go kill Bin Laden and “he might be able to bring Bin Laden’s head back in a box,” Woodward writes.
Black claims the CIA had about “100 sources and subsources” in Afghanistan who could have helped carry out the hit.
http://911review.org/Media/Osama_pre_9-11.html

Additional ties between southern Christian fundamentalists, Texas oil interests, and Russian-Israeli mobsters and weapons smugglers uncovered. According to informed Washington insiders, there is increasing evidence of financial links between key “Christian Right” GOP notables and an international ring of Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli mobsters. (also CIA +FBI)
http://911review.org/brad.com/911contractors/CIA_contractors_isreali.html

J. Michael Springmann, formerly chief of the visa section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has testified that he rejected hundreds of suspicious visa applications by Saudi Arabian men similar to those named as the “9/11 Hijackers Patsies” when we was head of the consular section of the US embassy in Jeddah, but C.I.A. officers repeatedly overruled him and ordered the visas to be issued.
Springmann protested to the State Department, the Office of Diplomatic Security, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and congressional committees, but was told to shut up. He later realized that this was a CIA operation, and wrote about it in the Spring 1997 issue of the journal Unclassified. After 9/11, Springmann observed that 15 of the 19 Hijackers Patsies got their visas from the very same CIA controlled consulate in Jeddah
http://911review.org/Wiki/CiaVisasForPatsies.shtml

The highest-ranking CIA official to admit he attended the poker parties thrown by Wilkes is Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the agency’s third-ranking official. (Foggo even “occasionally hosted the poker parties at his house in northern Virginia,” though he denies ever seeing prostitutes at the gatherings.) Foggo’s relationship with Wilkes goes back 30-plus years; the two were roommates in college, best men at each others’ weddings, and even “named their sons after each other.”
http://911review.org/humor/CIA/Goss.html

more…
http://911review.org/Alex/alex.html

great historical stuff about russia , spies, murders etc…
http://911review.org/Wiki/FSBThreatWithinRussia.shtml

I recently heard an interesting perspective on this point that I’d never considered. How efficient an economy is depends on how you define efficiency. In Western capitalism we define it as produce per worker. As production fluctates with the economy, so does the number of active workers – ie the employment rate. Thus we have an inbuilt ineffeciency – not all available workers are working. There is another big efficiency that is ignored – we need to sort out our own health etc problems (particularly in the US, I believe – I’m from Australia).

In communism however, work is divided/spread between all available workers. The costs to the economy associated with unemployed are erased. Add to this the State social security and health programs and the two systems seem more comparable.

That’s all I remember, but I’ve got a feeling I’ve missed out some points which made the argument stronger.

Another interesting consideration that no one has discussed here yet is the fact that China is politically communist but quite capitalist economically. Where does that fit in?

About politicians’ greed – I’m reminded of the statement that anyone who wants should be automatically disqualified from doing so.