Under Attack, Drug Maker Turned to Giuliani for Help
The work that Rudolph W. Giuliani's consulting firm did for the maker of the painkiller OxyContin provides a window into how he used his standing to aid a controversial client and build a business fortune.
www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/us/politics/28oxycontin.html
Populist Nation, a legitimate news blog recently conducted a survey and learned that 75% of Americans oppose the byzantine rules of the Perspective forum administrator.
Most users of Perspectives were wondering why a policy was enacted without clear rules of what constitutes a legitimate news source.
The editor of this blog has full press credentials from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, so if the thread with this link gets locked, it will prove that the rules are just a charade to control content.
What do you think?
I'm a member of the Perspectives bi-partisan forum and recently criticized the Bush administration for losing track of 190,000 weapons that were issued to the Iraqi Security to forces. My theory was that those weapons were stolen by members of the Iraq security force and put into the hands of various competing factions waging war against the American military in Iraq.
A fellow who calls himself Conservative Virginian wrote this reply:
How is Congress responsible for the loss of weapons in Iraq?
He [Bush] is the Commander In Chief, not an employee in the warehouse. According to the Government Accountability Office the blame is shared between Congress and the Department of Defense. Of course it is still the big evil George Bush's fault right? Is there anything that occurs in this country which is not Bush's fault? Last poll I saw had George Bush's Iraq approval ratings higher than Congresses, explain that away. The reality simply does not support the irrational claims of the Bush Haters.
What is going on with Bush?
Is he off his anti-psychotic medications?
Has he been hitting the Jim Beam?
Is premature senility setting in?
Is it a teleprompter malfunction?
What's your theory?
Keep in mind the guy at the podium is the same guy who claims to be keeping the United States safe from terrorism.
NOTE: I saw the original tape of this on MSNBC and there only one splice on the tape that happens after 31 seconds and ends around 36 seconds, so the video was edited for comic effect About 5 or 6 seconds were added to 60 seconds. I'm not sure why they person blogged it with that way because the MSNBC segment was equally funny.
. For the sake of debate, allow me to present a side of the argument against the war in Iraq that rarely gets discussed by the mainstream media because it can't summarized in two or three talking points or sound bytes. Some folks who understand military history and tactics will be on familiar ground here because much of what I'm going to write about is related to the Powell Doctrine.
I'm inclined to think that many orthodox old school conservatives and libertarians will appreciate the merits of my arguments more than partisan Republicans who generally take their line of march from Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the RNC.
Doesn't anybody wonder why, after 4 years hardly mentioning al Qaeda, the Republicans are suddenly obsessed with fight with talking about al Qaeda incessantly?
There's a reason why the Republicans want to shift the focus back to al Qaeda and the so-called war on terror. It distracts from any logical debate on the complete failure of the war in Iraq!
Bush and the Republicans don't even have a valid reason to be in Iraq unless they can persuade the American public that the War in Iraq and the War on Terror are one and the same thing. Otherwise it makes American troops a bunch of sitting ducks in a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. What Americans forget and the Bush administration fails to acknowledge is the sectarian fighting was out of control for 2 years prior to the arrival of al Qaeda in Iraq. We were already on the highway to hell in Iraq long before al Qaeda got interested in using Iraq as a training ground for their international terrorist brigades of militant jihadist wannabes.
From March 2003 until January 2004 there was no al Qaeda in Iraq and Bush was still failing miserably to restore order in Iraq with the American provisional government. Remember how Bush repeatedly assured the American public that free and democratic elections were the medicine that would cure the sectarian insurgency in Iraq?
Our problem in Iraq in 2004 is still the same problem we have in 2007: the Shiite majority is in a pitched battle with Sunni minority and the remnants of the old Baathist regime for exclusive control of Iraq. That has never been and never will be Mr. Bush's fight to win or lose. As long as the American military props up the current Iraqi government it's in the interest of all interested parties in Iraq to maintain a stalemate until the United States withdraws. Why? As it currently stands, any Shiite, Sunni or Kurd politician who as seen as too cozy with the United States will have their heads on the chopping block the minute the U.S. military withdraws.
The entire story of an al Qaeda resurgence in the past six month is utter bullsh*t. When al Qaeda finally hit the ground in Iraq in the spring of 2005 they were in a position to exploit Bush's mistakes in Iraq and al Qaeda has been doing it every since.
Without the United States in Iraq I think al Qaeda's incentive to be there will completely dissipate. The Shiite majority despises them and is likely to hunt them down and execute any foreign Sunni agitators connect to al Qaeda.
It's possible that Iraq will fall under the sway of Iran but I'm not even sure if that even poses a threat to the United States. The border wars between Iran and Iraq have been going on since Iraq was Mesopotamia and Iran was Persia. As long as they're distracted by fighting with each other I doubt whether they'll be a threat to anyone else in the region. It's not like either nation has designs on annexing Saudi Arabia or even Kuwait.
The threat of an Iran with nuclear capability simply is not a good enough reason to have 165,000 American troops stationed in Iraq ready to invade if Iran goes nuclear. Other enemies of the United States like the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Pakistan have developed a nuclear capacity and we've discovered that the best way to minimize the dangers of a hostile nation with nuclear capacity is to engage them in diplomacy.
The worst possible way to deter an enemy nation from using a nuke is to engage in threats, brinksmanship and military action. Like it or not, a lot more nations are going to develop a nuclear capacity and they are doing so mostly because those nations feel threatened by bigger nations, like the USA. The government of Iran would be the last nation that would be foolhardy enough to place a nuke in the hands of al Qaeda because Tehran is far more likely to be a target of an al Qaeda nuclear attack than Washington or Manhattan.
That brings us to the final bogus point that Bush has made about al Qaeda and the war on terror which is: We fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here."
Bush's entire premise for staying in Iraq is that if American troops withdraw from Iraq it will force us to secure our borders and do battle with al Qaeda in the homeland. But isn't that the entire purpose of a war on terror in the first place? Protecting your nation's borders against terrorist attacks is largely a defensive "homeland" operation and to the extent you displace resources to fight ground wars in foreign nations, your domestic security will suffer from it.
We want to fight al Qaeda on American soil and not get lured into to weakening the army and the national guard by traipsing off to the Middle East and to every global destination that al Qaeda chooses to target. I think it is possible to secure our borders and take out al Qaeda without fighting a two front war in two different nations to close al Qaeda down. It's probably the most inefficient way to decommission al Qaeda because a lot of innocent lives are placed in jeopardy and it only destabilizes the situation in the Middle East even more.
It all boils down to the original arguments made by contrarians like myself when Bush originally declared a war on terror in 2001. One cannot declare war on an ideology and engage an ideology in a conventional ground war, any more than one can kill an idea with a gun. You can't win a war with a figure of speech called "the war on terror." It's even debatable whether one can even win a conventional ground war because we are now living in the age of asymmetric warfare.The United States military is trained to do conventional combat on a 19th Century battlefield model where:
both sides have more or less the same weapons and tactics. In World War II, for example, the German tanks, planes, and machine guns battled the Allied tanks, planes, and machine guns. In the American Civil War, blue and grey alike had cannons and rifles and cavalry. In a conventional symmetric war, armies take and hold territory, there's a front line, and it's not too hard to tell the difference between soldiers and civilians.
Source: http://sangam.org/taraki/articles
Brutal and destructive as it can be, symmetric warfare has become (to a certain extent) civilized. There are rules. Soldiers wear uniforms so that you can tell who they are rather than shooting everything that moves. When soldiers surrender, a whole set of gentlemen's agreements come into play. Soldiers are like chess pieces; once captured they are removed from the board and kept safe until the end of the game. International agreements also proscribe the use of indiscriminate weapons like poison gas or disease
.
But as the British, the French and the United States expanded their colonial empires in the Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa. The insurgencies were playing by a new set of rules:
Asymmetric warfare happens when it's obvious who the winner of a symmetric war would be - maybe a symmetric war has already been fought and decisively won - but some core group on the losing side is not willing to give up and get on with life. Replaying the game of civilized symmetric warfare would just get them slaughtered to no purpose, but the issues of the war are so important that they cannot simply accept defeat. And so they fight on - outside the game, outside the rules.
Insurgents win wars by not losing. After the occupiers spend 5, 10, or 25 years and finally discover there is no way of winning the war, they will finally pull out and accept defeat. This is the story of the Americans in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and white settler governments in various parts of Africa. It is arguably the story of the Americans in Iraq as well.
The rise of asymmetrical warfare in the late 20th Century has made it nearly impossible for a colonial aggressor nation to defeat a grassroots insurgency and successfully occupy any smaller nation against it's will for any extended period of time because wars are no longer settled on a conventional field of battle and therefore the insurgent enemy wins by simply remaining an force of instability until the occupying army gives up. The colonial nation can always withdraw and go home but the insurgent natives don't have a place to call "home" if they don't resist the occupation by the colonial nation. The American military can build bases in Iraq and occupy it until the end of this century but it will not win the war in Iraq and it won't win any "wars on terror."
Americans have a hard time grasping this basic fact: Right up to the day the occupying power admits defeat and pulls out, it continues to wield overwhelming force. It may never lose a pitched battle. It may - right up to the end be able to go where it wants, killing and destroying at will.
That doesn't mean it's not losing.
