Stop Me Before I Vote Again

It's not all about occupation and gunmanship.

Sure, nobody with access to better means likes gunmanship or as the Turk said to the consigliere, " I don't like violence, Tom. I'm a businessman; blood is a big expense." But, if necessary that option remains on the table, especially when you're a little unsure about "deterrence" and "stability", i.e. when you need to reestablish your street cred as a world class hood.

ahh the great heroine of brenda starr

nice find perry
as usual not my pick for pic
only perry himself
has "the mr white touch "

http://charliechanfamily.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/castwoodbury01.jpg

yup

" when you're a little unsure"

i recall in casino
the final response line

after some top mugs
have been mulling over a hit list
and are munching
a tougher call
about whether or not to bump off
the jew played by alan king

after all his usefullness over the years
maybe he oughta get a reprieve ..no ??

decider in chief:
"why take the chance "

Ideological pretences come and go, but the "godfather principle" remains constant as the northern star:

…since government officials first formulated plans for a "grand area" strategy for US global domination in the early 1940s, successive administrations have been guided by a "godfather principle, straight out of the mafia: that defiance cannot be tolerated. It's a major feature of state policy." "Successful defiance" has to be punished, even where it damages business interests, as in the economic blockade of Cuba — in case "the contagion spreads".

seems my pals the nerf stalinists agree

hands off libya uncle baby

http://www.peoplesworld.org/just-say-no-to-a-no-fly-zone/

bobble head anti imperialism ???

MJS proposed a Libya thought experiment elsewhere. I came up with my own this morning, while listening to a Nominally Public Radio humanist panel debating what "we" should do. And the experiment brought me to this: If there's a no-fly zone, I'll have to root for Colonel Q. Or at least anyone's who's firing at the no-fly.

OP, as you've noted: it's not the hawks you have to worry about, it's the humanists:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/opinion/10kristof.html?hp

Couldn't Kristof have stuck to brothels? The effect of his column on the brains of his regular readers is only slightly less salubrious.

...demonstrating also, by elision and ellipsis, who already held the purse strings and the trigger guards in Egypt.

sk, so true. Said same to the mrs this am. No-fly machismo is so clearly the flip side of NK's white-man's-burden/do-gooder brothel-trolling. Could see this column coming a mile away.

"A Yank in Lybia"

Tossing one off in Tripoli? Beating the meat in Benghazi? I'm sorry all, my imagination is a filthy Tourette's stew.

NK's white-man's-burden/do-gooder brothel-trolling...

Too bad these busy-body 'agents of virtue' as Paul Theroux calls them tend to leave a place in worse shape once they're done with providing "aid".

My own guess is that the overclass knows less about what steps to take in this quagmire than in the economy.

Speaking of hypotheticals, doesn't all this pretty much put the QED on the elite case in favor of GHW Bush? "If it ain't fixed, don't break it."

I get a feeling that there's nothing democratic about the stuff going on in many of the Middle East countries like Libya. It's more of one power trying to supplant the ruling power.

20 some odd dif. groups in the opposition - might wonder about organization. Same time at least one of these appears to have fairly advanced surface to air weapons [the official air force is rag tag bunch of old soviet planes]

Hal, I don't that feeling at all.

Tunisia and Egypt were both pretty much classic early-stage revolutions: The crowds marched on the squares and palaces, the soldiers declined to open fire on them, the ruler abdicated. It all happened quite quickly and even the erstwhile opposition groups were often left bewildered and panting behind the course of events.

What happened in Cairo wasn't categorically different from Paris or Petrograd.

The worsted factions in Egypt and Tunisia, after overcoming their initial shock, will attempt some sort of counter-revolution. They might succeed, but if they fail the populace will become radicalized, especially if foreigners are openly involved in the counter-revolution.

In Libya, the army did open fire on the protesters. Typically, that means that the revolution will fail, unless foreign powers support the rebels, in which case the civil war could continue for some time, or perhaps Cyrenaica will become a like a Biafra that succeeds.

Now what would be extremely interesting would be if a natural mutant genius emerged to play the role of Bonaparte, united all the Arab peoples, and shattered the entire world economic structure and power-balance. Nothing like a "Mule" to make Hari Seldon roll in his grave!

I'm a recovering, repentant, gliberal, regressive phlegmocrat.

I'm much more interested in analyses which deal with our collapsing Empire of Growth within the nexus of our Culture of Make Believe and finite Earth:

This Time We’re Taking the Whole Planet With Us

The Oil Economy Is Collapsing With Every Protest in the Middle East
(minus the obligatory, potentially hopeful, ending paragraph: because there will be no magical, clean, green techno-future and the sooner we stop selling and buying this pathetic line of BS the better off we'll be)

As for the Revolutions themselves, I'm with Micah White:

A Lesson for Americans: The people rising up abroad are our future

And Chris Hedges:

Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand

Even though I have no illusions about Amerika and its people.

Which is to say, as things continue to go from bad to worse, I see more of what Naomi Klein envisions (not a fan of hers: she still insists Barak Insane Obama is a, "centrist"--never mind there is no such animal--who can be pushed to do the right thing, whatever the "right thing" is within our hopelessly perverse and corrupt system) when she speaks of Fortress Continents.

And I have no doubt the Left-in-name-only will be more than amenable to Fortress Amerika when it realizes the nightmare of the Amerikan dream will not continue without such measures.

After all, the Left-in-name-only barely raises its voice, let alone opens its mouth, with regard to our unsustainable-by-definition, myth-of-linear-progress-based way-of-life as it is.

Complicity is innocence, apparently...