Now I'm Wrong About Kagan

First I predicted Bush and his advisors would decide the best way out of Iraq would be to just side with the Shiia. Instead, it seems he will go after them, try to defang the militias. Good luck,men.ThenI said "Baker is locked in a struggle with Lindeen, Kagan, and Kristol" and I was sure Baker would prevail. Wrong again. Though Condi did lodge a surprising complaint about new settlement building in the West Bank, the Israel First crowd down there at the American Enterprise Institute seems to be calling the shots. Neocon poster boy Fredrick Kagan will end up with the most blood on his hands, which is impressive amongst a crew of world class butchers.

The AEI is butcher central, be it through bullets or neoliberal economic policy. Kagan's colleague Roger Noriega, head Venezuelan coup plotter, continues to shill for the corporate elite. His job gets harder and harder as the WTO sputters and the FTTA is declared dead on arrival. Here is economist Walden Bellow on core problems facing the globalization project:
"Rather than forge a common ,cooperative response to the global crisis of over-production, stagnation and environmental ruin, national capitalist elites have competed with each other to shift the burden of adjustment." Pigs can't be birds.

Of course, there are times when this group does manage to cooperate, in order to make money from sweat, like when they come together to oppose China's new Draft Labor Contract Law. Designed to grant Chinese workers more rights, US and European corporations have formed a cartel to threaten the Chinese government not to implement it. This despite the Thom Friedmanesque rhetoric about "free markets and democracy". How do they sleep at night?

And before the moment passes, I just got to call bullshit on all this "calm and healing our nation" Jerry Ford bilge. Stephen Zunes over at Foreign Policy in Focus gives a slightly less sentimental perspective. 1975, Ford pushes Spain to renege on it's promise to grant independence to Western Sahara, Morrocco invades and remains to this day,imposing a brutal military occupation. That same year, Ford and Kissinger give Indonesian dictator Suharto the green light to invade East Timore where 20,000 eventually die. Soon thereafter ,he vetoes the first UN Security Council resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state. On top of these wonderful accomplishments ,Ford managed to provide economic and military aid to dozens of dictators including Pinochet, Marcos, the Shah of Iran,Mobutu in Zaire and the aparthied regime in South Africa. Nixon should have been stripped and paraded around the country in the back of a donkey cart. Then we might have seen some "healing".