Know your Enemy

Read the transcript of the latest Al Qaeda tape. These guys aren't stupid. Like Goebbels, they know all about the big lie. The problem is, with the kind of incompetence and invective so prominent at the highest levels of our government, lies like this sound reasonable. Bin Laden (if he's still alive) has no illusions about his goal. He wants to rule the world. Basically, he wants him and his fellow lunatics to take the place of corporations and governments at the pinnacle of power. But because of the way that western governments and multinational corporations do business, he can easily claim to be acting in the interest of the downtrodden. We're giving him ammunition for his propaganda with every day that genocide continues in Darfur or malaria goes untreated in Malawi. It doesn't matter that a jihadist world government would usher in a holocaust unlike the world has ever seen. So long as the west has the resources to fix world problems, without actually doing so, the jihadist manifesto will sound like a good alternative to desperate people.

Bedazzled by Stars

It seems that as long as someone has stars on their lapel, their word gets taken as gospel truth. It just seems to me that there's too big of a bubble placed around diplomats and top brass for them to get any real idea of what the deal is. Instead of listening to them, maybe we should start taking the word of actual soldiers at face value. I know many of them think things are working, and I certainly can't contradict them from my apartment in Cambridge. But I can offer the view of people like Alex Horton who make a lot of sense. Maybe the soldiers who say they're making a difference and we've "turned the corner" in Iraq are right. I'd love to believe it, because whatever the reactionaries say, no American has a defeatist agenda except the sleeper cells. No one wants to see Iraq end up as another failed state. But then, there might not be anything we can do about it. Improvement in isolated areas is not enough.