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We are Hungry in Three Languages: Prelude to World War
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/john-stanton/54487/we-are-hungry-in-three-languages-prelude-to-world-warWe are Hungry in Three Languages: Prelude to World War
Foreign Policy
by John Stanton | February 27, 2014 - 9:25am
On 24 February 2014 US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel held a press conference to announce some of the details of Pentagons 2015 budget. Beyond the news of cuts in war fighting machinery and personnel and the pox of irresponsible sequestration on the federal government Hagel made a point of indicating that the world is becoming an increasingly volatile place. He also seemed to express a bit of disgust for nation building of the type attempted by the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those sentiments are directly at odds with the core element of US national and global security strategy in operation since the late 19th Century. Those strategies employ the USAs considerable instruments of national power to: 1) actively destabilize elected governments (Ukraine, Venezuela) through the use of NGOs, intelligence agencies and proxy groups; 2) prop up brutal regimes (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt) through a US congressionally approved program, executed by the US military, called Foreign Internal Defense; 3) information operations conducted via the printed press, social media, radio, television and film that seek to shape the cognitive local to global environment in favor of US national interests.; and 4) existentially destroy foreign governments through direct military action in conjunction with the weaponry of finance capitalism to create new markets.
All of this is codified in one form or another in US political and military doctrine. Every American president from George Washington to Barack Obama has trumpeted in some fashion what President Obama and President Bush George W, Bush both proclaimed. The former indicated that the US will pursue its own interests no matter what any other nation on the planet thinks, even invoking Gods plan to put the care of the global environment in Americas hands. The latter put it more simply, You are either with us or against us. The heads of foreign governmentsand their opponents are well aware of US strategy, tactics and operations.
What Civilian Leadership?
In the middle of this sits the US Department of Defense and the military branches of the US government. While they certainly advocate for their budgetary interests, have their share of drunks, overstep the civil-military divide, and engage is occasional battlefield atrocities, the fact is that they take their guidance and instructions from American civilians who are elected and appointed to provide the guiding strategyand funding to which the military designs its own strategy, tactics and operations.
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We are Hungry in Three Languages: Prelude to World War (Original Post)
unhappycamper
Feb 2014
OP
Cleita
(75,480 posts)1. I have always thought it was barbaric that we have hungry people in a nation that
throws out food that sits on grocery shelves too long, that people die from not being able to get medical attention in a nation that is supposed to have the most state of the art medicine in the world. That people have to sleep in the streets when there are empty houses and buildings every where. We are truly cursed as a people when we allow this to happen.