#EndlessWar is still about oil in the end

NPR graphic; numbers as of 2012.

President Obama, who's kept troops in Iraq, bombed Yemen, bombed and CIA-ed Libya, and other things to expand Bush's War on Terra, has proven that more than once.

The biggest proof just came down the pike today, though, with his threat to veto a bill that would let 9/11 victims and their families sue the government of Saudi Arabia.

Despite both the Bush and Obama White Houses doing all they could and can to stonewall looking into, and making public, Riyadh's connections to 9/11, it's clear that dots are out there waiting to be connected by legal action.

As for BushCo, Sen. Bob Graham has long claimed that Shrub shit-canned any attempt to bring the Saudi connection to light. He just reiterated that on Saturday.

Now, a couple of points.

First, both House and Senate passed the bill by voice vote. How many Congressional cockroaches will scurry for daylight when forced to stand on a record vote remains to be seen.

Second, what will the Saudis do if it becomes law? While the "shale revolution" has helped decrease the percentage of oil we import, we still import a lot. Just not all of it from the Saudis.

If the Saudis did try an embargo, it's likely both Iran and Iraq would do all they could to fill the gap. U.S. producers would step to the plate. And tar sands in Canada would ramp up. I can't see the U.S. having a major hurt, at least in the short term. And, after commodities futures markets got done with their rumor-mongering, I think the per-barrel price would settle at around $65.

#NeverForget ... all those preventable deaths besides 9/11, hyperpatriots

I actually did a newspaper op-ed column about this two years after Sept. 11, 2001. But, I know the basics of it still, and with flags being waved in plenty, let's roll. (sic)

First, I can call out American exceptionalism without saying anybody on 9/11 deserved it.

Second, I can call out our government for whitewashing the degree of Saudi involvement, like Jill Stein, without being a 9/11 truther.

OK, I've cleared the decks.

Let's roll.

The United States has millions of cases of preventable deaths every year. Some are of diminishing returns, as far as regulatory efforts, or self-control, or both.

Three are not, and two of them directly involve government regulation that's blocked by right-wingers.

Let's roll.

Tobacco, with 450,000 or more killings a year, kills more people every three days, than died in 9/11. Big Tobacco knew it was producing a killer even before the 1964 Surgeon General report. Rather than cooperate in any way, it spread its denialism to Big Oil, on climate change and other issues. We continue to pay the price.

Alcohol problems, from cirrhosis and cancer to DWIs and work accidents, kills as many people every 10 days as died in 9/11. This one is equal opportunity. Alcoholism, like illicit drugs, kills across all races, all socioeconomic statuses, and presumably all political stances.

But, let's go back to that first link.

Violent deaths in America kill as many people every three weeks as died in 9/11. And, in the U.S., unlike most developed nations, most the violent homicides and a high percentage of the suicides are from guns.

The guns that right-wing hyperpatriots don't want regulated.

So, guns kill as many people in America every six weeks as 9/11.

And, 9/11 happened just once.

EVERY three days, tobacco kills another 3,000.

EVERY 10 days, alcohol kills another 3,000.

EVERY six weeks, guns kill another 3,000.

Never forget?

Let's start by remembering that.

As for 9/11, the long history of U.S. coups in the Middle East and elsewhere has also killed more than 3,000 people. Again, this doesn't mean that "America deserved it."

But, just like hypocritically unhealthy living, it does mean America should look in the mirror.

Andrew Sullivan quits blogging; I shall cry no rivers for Sully's #hypocrisy

So Andrew Sullivan is giving up blogging? Boo hoo.

Because, Sully, I'm going to deconstruct your farewell post just like I was PolitiFact.

Let's start here:

(W)e experienced 9/11 together in real time – and all the fraught months and years after; and then the Iraq War; and the gay marriage struggles of the last fifteen historic years. We endured the Bush re-election together

A funny statement to make, as I just Tweeted Sully. Yes, per Wiki, he "repented" in time to vote for John Kerry in 2004. However, he was dumb enough to support a moral conservative in the first place in 2000.

Beyond that, his "four cardinal sins" on supporting the Iraq War in the first place show someone shockingly ignorant of geopolitics in general and the Arab world in particular, thus invoking some sort of Peter Principle issues.

Of course, that same general lack of brilliance led him to name his own personal "journalism" awards after Brat Pack "journalists" Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein.

Of course, as Wiki also reminds, and I do too, only more bluntly, that's due to Sully's "Bell Curve" infatuation, which I must say is high-grade racialism and nothing less.

And, that led to some blog spoofing by me, here, for the blog post where my Photoshopping above first appeared.

That in turn was part of his general work for a racist magazine, which is what The New Republic was. Hell, maybe he was having gay sex with Marty Peretz (who is far more nutty than painted at that link) for all I know.

Speaking of, and back to that part of his farewell.

He wasn't fighting the struggles for gay marriage 15 years ago. As Wiki reminds, per this Salon piece, 12 years ago he was fighting the fight on the down low for bearback gay sex at a time when AIDS concerns in the gay community were still pretty damned high. (Showing the weirdness of Salon at times, two years earlier, another writer defended him.)

Yeah, he eventually got married. But, not until three years after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage. So, again, Sully, not in front on that fight.

It's all part of Sully's seeming hypocrisy, the hypocrisy that makes him at least as much a "cafeteria Catholic" as a John Kerry.

Next?

This:

You were there when I couldn’t believe Palin’s fantasies.

What about your own fantasies, namely that Bristol Palin was Trigg Palin's mom? I eventually repented of following you and the "Palin Deception" website down that rabbithole, finding more reasonable possible explanations for Sarah's nuttery around Trigg's birth. But you, apparently, never did. 

Then this:

You were there when … we live-blogged the Green Revolution for an entire month.

Ahh, yes, when Twitter was supposedly the force overturning Iran, then the whole non-democratic world.

That was a conceit that was being refuted even as Sully mouthed it. I tackled some of that nonsense here.

It's all part of Sully's seeming hypocrisy, the hypocrisy that makes him at least as much a "cafeteria Catholic" as a John Kerry.

I don't begrudge at all his personal reasons for leaving. But, per the hypocrisy, he probably was about to fracture his spine figuring out new ways to triangulate himself.

Also, I don't get some liberals who think he's the bees' knees.

Was money the reason to quit?

I am not sure.

His last post says he was making $1 million revenue/year. Now, deducting for assistance (staff of about 10 at peak, perhaps; 7 non-Sully plus one intern listed now) ... overhead, etc., could he afford all this? Assume Sully paid himself $150K. The seven others, on average, about $80K. That’s $700K; whatever he paid the intern and overhead... yea, he was making money. Maybe not as rich as whatever Atlantic paid him before, but I don’t think he was going broke.

On the other hand, a WaPost story says he took no salary in the first year. And, it's not clear how well he maintained his renewal rate. Matthew Ingram talked about some of this early on.

On the third hand, he doesn't mention finances as a reason to throw in the towel.

Beyond that, I don't get why he had so many followers.

Half of what he posted was too short for even a Tumblr. That's why, beyond not agreeing with much of what he said, I don't get why that many people would pay to read him. In that way, he reminded me of Duncan Black, aka Atrios, running the blog Eschaton, which, while more liberal than Sully, years ago became just as short if not shorter on a regular basis.

The only sidebar to this is that it shows his vaunted tip jar/self-subscription model for blogging may not be such a model. Here is my original thoughts on his setting up his subscription model riff on a tip jar. I didn't think about it at the time, but, on the model he proposed, it's "interesting" that he missed the whole "tragedy of the commons" angle.

Actually, it's not "interesting" — it's really a "no duh." Libertarian types in general refuse to acknowledge such a thing even exist. I love the sound of petards hoisting in the morning!

9-11 — 11 years later

I was headed into work Tuesday, Sept.11, 2001, at the time the second plane hit. I was listening to classical music on the radio, and don't normally watch TV when I get up, so I had no idea bout the first plane.

But, it was clear what was up was more than just an accident. And, although not at a daily, I was in the newspaper biz, as I *still am* today .

So, one of our ad salespeople had friends she knew were in NYC, and we got through to one of them before cell phone service was overwhelmed.

A week later, I wrote an “open letter to President Bush” editorial column, asking that he NOT use this as an excuse to create something like what became called the Patriot Act.

A year later, I wrote a column noting that, while 9/11 deaths should not be minimized, they should be put into context, especially related to self-destructive deaths. And, no, not suicide. I noted that cigarettes killed as many people every couple of days, and alcohol abuse every week or so, as 9/11 did.

But, even today, some people think we didn’t overreact. And need to be refuted.

Meanwhile, we continue to play “whack a mole” with alleged Taliban leadership in Afghanistan, when it’s clear that it’s structured differently from a U.S capitalist corporation and keeps on keeping on. Beyond that, Dear Leader, President Obama, can’t explain why we remain in that doorknob-forsaken place propping up a kleptocratic ruler.

And, then, there’s Iraq. War in the name of a lie, as Obama, albeit perhaps in part for political reasons but more for reasons of state, refuses to bring the liars to justice. That's even as it's clear than ever that even before the Aug. 6, 2001 famous Presidential Daily Brief, Bush had clear information al Qaeda was looking to strike inside the U.S.

Are we “safer”?

Maybe it’s the wrong question to ask. Maybe we need to rethink the issue of “safety.”

We've had attempts at further actions since then. Maybe they would have been worse without the bureaucratic Department of Homeland Security; maybe not. Maybe they wouldn't have been worse without invading Iraq.

And, speaking of, a weakened Iraq has emboldened Iran, which in turn has tempted U.S. neoconservatives and Israeli hardliners with the dream of a pre-emptive strike against its nuclear development, whatever it is.

And, since Obama’s election, our “post-racial president” has seen increases in presidential threats, veiled attacks on race, and domestic terrorism against Sikhs, Muslims, and federal government employees.

As far as the other U.S. wet dream, more that of Cheneyites than true blue neocons, control of Iraq hasn't done much for oil prices. If anything, Bush's Great Recession (with Dems helping it out somewhat) plus fracking for shale oil, have been the primary factors in keeping oil prices away from that $147/bbl speculator fueled peak in 2008. (Not that either party has seen to address commodities speculation since.)

Obama's stricter EPA standards will help with lessening oil reliance, but ... they're riddled with loopholes, including for flex-fuel vehicles. And, other than the overpriced Volt, GM is abandoning even lite hybrids, which means that it will probably either pay big fines to the EPA or else ask for exemptions or waivers.

So, "oil security" isn't all that, either. 

How much 'protection' is Bush giving Saudis?

That's the bottom-line thesis of Anthony Summers' great new book, "The Eleventh Hour." It's not as in depth as Lawrence Wright on what led up to 9/11, but it takes a good look at the 9/11 Commission, its report, and what it did and did not look at. That includes asking why the final chapter of the commission's report is almost totally censored.

From my Goodreads review:

The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden by Anthony Summers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Seeing Anthony Summers as co-author (along with his wife) made me both excited and a bit apprehensive about this new book overviewing 9/11. Summers has done great work on Nixon, but in his “The File on the Tsar” he gave credence to conspiracy ideas, claiming that at least Anastasia, if not other daughters of Nicholas II, escaped the cellar in Ekarterinberg.

Well, I was pleasantly relieved early on. Quite so.

Summers quickly dismisses conspiracy theories about the attacks, focusing above all on the Twin Towers. On the engineering side, he refers to the authoritative NIST report. On the common-sense side, he raises the rhetorical question of how could saboteurs plant thousands of pounds of C4 or whatever inside the Twin Towers and never be caught?

The middle 50 percent of the book gives an overview of how al Qaeda came to plot this. Not too much new here, primarily a good tying together of time line issue. But, he does note one thing in conjunction with the CIA’s quasi-criminal laxness on reporting would-be 9/11 hijackers to the FBI. (Plenty on that, a fair amount of the FBI’s bad-enough laxness.)

Reportedly, the CIA may have been trying to “turn” two of the eventual hijackers in an attempt to “penetrate” al Qaeda. Oops! Beyond that, some people claim that Saudi intelligence may have been using the same duo as a go-between, to try to “control” bin Laden.

Summers thinks that of little credence. But the general idea of how much Saudis, including royals, were connected to bin Laden, before, during and after 9/11? Different story.

The final quarter of the book uses as its starting point the fact that the whole final chapter of the 9/11 Commission’s report is still censored/redacted. Why?

Summers speculates, and has a few facts to offer. The censor is George W. Bush himself; he’s acting to protect those Saudi royals. And, there’s strands of evidence to indicate they were individually funneling money to bin Laden, and staying in some sort of contact with al Qaeda members, before 9/11, close to 9/11, and possibly even afterward.

I won’t give details of that; no need for too much spoiler alert. But … read!




View all my reviews

Egypt, the U.S., Mubarak, 9/11, Arab democracy

Ross Douthat, in what might just be his best column ever, completes a circle of sorts by reminding us that the U.S.'s continued propping up of Mubarak was surely a major factor in 9/11. Remember, mastermind Mohamed Atta, among others, was Egyptian. He notes that the thuggish nature of Mubarak's crackdown on the Muslim Brotehrhood, as we turned a blind eye to that, caused people like Atta to develop.

The column is good enough, as far as it goes.

But, it gets better, as he calls out the neocons and other democracy-promoting idealists who lose their idealism when Islamic political parties become part of the mix. Or, when other things don't go according to the plans on paper.

I'm making a long, deserved, quote:

The memory of Nasser is a reminder that even if post-Mubarak Egypt doesn’t descend into religious dictatorship, it’s still likely to lurch in a more anti-American direction. The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door.

Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.

To me, this is another part of American exceptionalism — the idea that American politics, and foreign policy, is so great that other nations should just automatically line up. It's also another part of American exceptionalism — that the general public, as well as the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, can maintain directly contradictory ideas in place at the same time, because we're America, dammit.

Automakers’ 9-11 red-white-blue wash

Whether some PR mole at one of the formerly Big Three automakers started recirculating the e-mail or just some allegedly patriotic American, there’s a largely bogus e-mail in cyberspace right now contrasting the post-9/11 response of the noble American carmakers to the chintzy Japs and Euros.

Well, the e-mail is selective in factual content and lying in produced impression, as Snopes points out. The e-mail startd in October 2001 and has been recirculated recently.

As for patriotism:
1. Is it patriotic to inflict junk on Americans?
2. Is it patriotic to continue to build gas-guzzlers using foreign oil even as you know Peak Oil is coming?
3. Is it patriotic to continue to build gas-guzzlers knowing you’re contributing to global warming?

The answers, of course, are no, no, and no.

Afghanistan, al-Qaida and 9/11 — Ted Rall has a slightly different take

Rall this week gives his clearest enunciation to his thesis that Osama bin Laden did NOT orchestrate the 9/11 attacks.

Well, who, then? Is Rall a conspiracy theorist?

The answer to the second question is no. Rall doesn’t believe George W. Bush or Mossad orchestrated the attacks. He does finger Muslim radicals.

Only, he points the finger at the Egyptian-originated Islamic Jihad, not al-Qaida. Now, that said, Islamic Jihad was founded by bin Laden right-hand man Ayman al-Zawahiri, and in June 2001, Zawahiri officially merged it with al-Qaida.

So, if I’m reading Rall correctly, he’s arguing that Zawahiri had at least started this operation before the merger, and that he kept independent control of it afterward, to the degree he still had any hands on the operation in those last three months.

I think Ted is hair-splitting a bit here. Zawahiri and bin Laden were together long before the formal merger of their organizations. Even if bin Laden didn’t start the idea, he certainly was involved. That said, after the merger, Islamic Jihad controlled six of nine seats on the combined entities’ “board of directors.”

Anyway, this is a sidebar to Rall’s belief that we, contrary to Democrats who still want one war, shouldn’t be in Iraq OR Afghanistan.

First, as he notes, if we want(ed) bin Laden, well, he was almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, on 9/11. There, he’s right. And, considering that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence had built up the Taliban hosts of al-Qaida and Islamic Jihad for years, we should have done more with Pakistan. Rather than warn Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to play ball with us, if we had any CIA capability, we probably should have looked at overthrowing him. At the least, we should have told him we would blockade the country if he didn’t seal his border against Afghanistan, and hand over bin Laden ASAP.

Anyway, back to Rall’s take on Afghanistan. He says that since Afghan President Hamid Karzai only controls about 15 percent of the country, even less than the official U.S. estimate of 30 percent, we’d be pounding sand down a rathole to follow up on Barack Obama’s “mini-surge” idea of sending 3,000-8,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond the strategic issues are the social and natural geography ones: Afghanistan’s population is about 20 percent larger than Iraq’s and its land area about 50 percent greater.

Rudy to get “Swift-Boated”

A number of New York-based 9-11 agencies are setting up an umbrella nonprofit group to chase Rudy aroundthe country and note poor decisions, or lack of decisions by him that exacerbated 9-11, as well as post 9-11 decisions, such as not giving first responders respirators until November 2001.

Couldn’t happen to a better guy. Plus, it’s nice to see a real ReThug get a taste of his own medicine.