The Pentagon has launched an investigation into why its Joint Forces Staff College has been teaching a course advocating tomorrow's generals prepare to inflict genocide on the Muslim world.
Sound bizarre? Unbelievable? Well, guess what? It happened and it's been going on for a while. The story came to light recently when Wired magazine's terrific blog, Danger Room, broke the story and even posted the course materials advocating the annihilation of the world's Muslim population, including nuclear strikes on targets like Mecca. That's genocide to the order of 1.4-billion people.
How is that thinking even possible in what is the ringmaster of the modern military circus Canada serves? It's the almost inevitable result of a transformation that has swept through the United States armed forces since 9/11. There have been plenty of warnings this was happening and we have largely ignored them all. I began writing about this in August, 2010 after reading Andrew Bacevich's, "The New American Militarism" and works by others on point. You can find some of those posts here, and here, and here. You can find any number of other articles on the advance of this malignancy on this blog.
To put it in a nutshell, this course made it to the curriculum of the American's military's staff college through the powerful perversion of that military itself. Scrapping this course, burning all the course materials, retiring a few senior officers, won't change a thing. This course is only a symptom of a problem that has been allowed to metastasize throughout the American military establishment from the bottom ranks to the top.
What is exposed here is the result of a horrific marriage of neoconservativism, evangelical fundamentalism, and an ascendant military/industrial/commercial warfighting complex all under the umbrella of a corporatist federal government. And this is how a nation is created in which military force supplants diplomacy as the preferred instrument of foreign policy. This is madness writ large. It represents the evolution of a fourth branch of American government, a military that is gradually taking political powers that rival those of what are supposed to be its civilian masters. It's a genie out of its bottle.
And what of Canada? We should finally see what's happening in the Pentagon, its staff colleges and in the field and we should be making tracks in the opposite direction, putting safe distance between ourselves and the Americans until they cure themselves of this contagion. But what are we doing? Just the opposite.
Canada is integrating our military with that of the Americans in a manner that ties our foreign policy to theirs. Nothing makes that point more powerfully than the F-35 stealth light bomber.
Our opposition parties have done a shamefully poor job of handling the F-35 issue. Being the lazy bastards they are, they've gone for the low-hanging fruit - what does it really cost, who knew what and when? Here's a hint - the cost issue is almost irrelevant compared to the greater issues the F-35 raises.
What matters about the F-35 is what it does and what it doesn't do in the broadest terms. You begin by accepting it's a medium range, stealth light bomber. It's not a long-range interceptor. It's not an air-superiority dogfighter. It's a bomber with some questionable high-tech advantages that are designed for it to be used offensively in penetration strikes into the territory of sophisticated adversaries. If it works as claimed it only works in conjunction with very expensive and sophisticated support aircraft that Canada neither has nor intends to acquire. That means the F-35 works in support of the country that does have those sophisticated support aircraft which, by process of elimination, means the United States - the same military that's staff college lectures on wiping out 1.4-billion Muslims. So, when you harness your military to the F-35, you're actually hitching your horse to America's war wagon. You're just taking on blind faith that the guy with the reins won't steer you wrong. Good luck with that.
But, as I said, the F-35 is also about what it isn't, what it doesn't do. It isn't a long-range interceptor aircraft of the type Canada needs to secure our vast, empty northern airspace. And it isn't a dogfighter capable of holding its own against the best our potential adversaries can toss at us. So what does that mean? That means to sign on to the F-35, we transfer those essential defence, security and sovereignty roles to someone else and who would that be? Full points for guessing the United States. The same "end of days", hyper-militarized United States. The same United States that still doesn't recognize Canada's territorial claims in the far north. Do you like the fit?
I wish I was making this up, I really do. But I can't wish it away. This is happening and it's been happening for most of this 21st Century. It is a contagion and it needs to be quarantined. And that is what the opposition needs to zero in on.
Showing posts with label US militarism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US militarism. Show all posts
Friday, May 11, 2012
Thursday, May 10, 2012
As Though We Need Another Reason to Ditch the F-35
Listen up, this is serious. The American Warfare State, the very one that any country buying the F-35 is signing on to serve, has achieved a degree of madness that we cannot afford to overlook. This much is plain from details emerging of a course at the Pentagon's Joint Forces Staff College that taught America's future military leaders that American security required total war on Muslims, all of them. They've been advocating genocide, mass extermination.
"The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists... Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”
"The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class."
...The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.
"For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.
“'We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’ Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies.
“'It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”
Dooley could not be reached for comment. Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams declined to discuss Dooley’s presentation or his status at the school. But when asked if Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded, “I don’t know if I would classify him [Dooley] as responsible. That would be the commandant” of the school, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward.
That makes the two-star general culpable for rather shocking material. In the same presentation, Dooley lays out a possible four-phase war plan to carry out a forced transformation of the Islam religion. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” (It’s an especially ironic suggestion, in light of today’s news that Saudi intelligence broke up the most recent al-Qaida bombing plot.)
International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”
If you find this shocking, you shouldn't. It's the very sort of thing that some, like retired US Army Colonel turned professor, Andrew Bacevich, has warned of in books like his "The New American Militarism." America has descended into a true "warfare state" - a hellspawn of neoconservatism, evangelical fundamentalism, and corporate warfighting/military industrialism - in which military subordination to the country's political leadership, including its executive branch, has become subverted. This is merely one example of America's military leaders taking upon themselves planning and policy-making even going to annihilation of civilian populations.
We need to be distancing ourselves from this maniacal, messianic militarism and that absolutely mandates rejecting the F-35 and all its dire implications for Canadian foreign policy.
"The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists... Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”
"The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class."
...The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.
"For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.
“'We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’ Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies.
“'It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”
Dooley could not be reached for comment. Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams declined to discuss Dooley’s presentation or his status at the school. But when asked if Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded, “I don’t know if I would classify him [Dooley] as responsible. That would be the commandant” of the school, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward.
That makes the two-star general culpable for rather shocking material. In the same presentation, Dooley lays out a possible four-phase war plan to carry out a forced transformation of the Islam religion. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” (It’s an especially ironic suggestion, in light of today’s news that Saudi intelligence broke up the most recent al-Qaida bombing plot.)
International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”
If you find this shocking, you shouldn't. It's the very sort of thing that some, like retired US Army Colonel turned professor, Andrew Bacevich, has warned of in books like his "The New American Militarism." America has descended into a true "warfare state" - a hellspawn of neoconservatism, evangelical fundamentalism, and corporate warfighting/military industrialism - in which military subordination to the country's political leadership, including its executive branch, has become subverted. This is merely one example of America's military leaders taking upon themselves planning and policy-making even going to annihilation of civilian populations.
We need to be distancing ourselves from this maniacal, messianic militarism and that absolutely mandates rejecting the F-35 and all its dire implications for Canadian foreign policy.
Monday, November 21, 2011
The Sky is Falling - US Generals Warn America in Real Danger if Military Spending is Cut
A US Marine Corps general is the latest stuffed tunic to warn of dire consequences to America if the Pentagon's budget is cut. Corps Commandant General James Amos says he's sure that something sort of awful will befall the American military from budget cuts.
“We as a nation don’t even know, or have not got a sense of appreciation for, the impact that sequestration’s going to have on the Department of Defense,” Amos said, leaning in to drive home his point. “I don’t think we understand the magnitude of the impact that sequestration would have."
I would love to hear these generals explain how, with defence expenditures greater than every other nation on the planet combined, they have made such a total botch up of America's conflicts in/with Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. When was the last time these bozos actually won a war? That's "won" in the sense of achieving their government's pre-conflict objectives?
It strikes me that, when you've had plenty of chances but have struck out every time, you don't get to bitch if someone wants to burst your bloated budget. And you certainly don't get to scare the hell out of the public with vague threats of danger that doesn't exist. And, if that's the best you can do, maybe you should just turn in your stars and take a serious interest in golf.
“We as a nation don’t even know, or have not got a sense of appreciation for, the impact that sequestration’s going to have on the Department of Defense,” Amos said, leaning in to drive home his point. “I don’t think we understand the magnitude of the impact that sequestration would have."
I would love to hear these generals explain how, with defence expenditures greater than every other nation on the planet combined, they have made such a total botch up of America's conflicts in/with Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. When was the last time these bozos actually won a war? That's "won" in the sense of achieving their government's pre-conflict objectives?
It strikes me that, when you've had plenty of chances but have struck out every time, you don't get to bitch if someone wants to burst your bloated budget. And you certainly don't get to scare the hell out of the public with vague threats of danger that doesn't exist. And, if that's the best you can do, maybe you should just turn in your stars and take a serious interest in golf.
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