Guess which game is #1. That’s right, the 6 OT game against UConn.

Also, there are 2 Cuse performances in the Top College Basketball performances of the 2000’s: Gerry McNamara’s heroics in the 2006 Big East Tournament, and Carmelo Anthony’s performance in the 2003 Final Four.

Gerry’s BET Heroics

Carmelo’s Final Four performance

Also, just a hint for fellow Syracuse fans, don’t look at the Top Upsets page…

Vermont State Police honored several members Thursday for actions under pressure and noted six troopers who are being deploying to Afghanistan with the Vermont National Guard.

The award recipients:

Sgt. Thomas A. Mozzer Jr. won the prestigious and rarely given medal of honor and the combat cross for his role in an November 2008 incident. State police described the case this way: Mozzer responded to a call from a Proctor woman worried about her husband, found him in an upstairs bedroom holding a handgun. The man rushed Mozzer, fled then returned to the room and exchanged gunfire with Mozzer, who halted the man with non-life-threatening wounds. Mozzer tended to the man’s wounds, then helped the couple’s 6-year-old son out of the house.

Trooper First Class Stacy Corliss won the combat cross for her response to a house where a man was pointing a gun at his brother. State police said that the gunman retreated to his apartment and reportedly fired a shot. The gunman ran down the stairs pointed the gun at Corliss. She fired and though she did not hit him, he dropped to the ground and surrendered.

Lt. Michael Macarilla won the Lifesaving Award for his actions Nov. 19, 2008, when he was training at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Va., and a classmate had a heart attack as he was crossing the finish line in a physical fitness run. State police said Macarilla joined with others in providing first aid.

Senior Trooper Jonathan Graham won the Lifesaving Award for his actions July 30 in Weathersfield, where people were stranded in the fast-moving Black River. Graham, also a chief petty officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, had a dry suit and life jacket in his car, reached a young girl who was unable to reach shore and could not swim.

Senior Trooper Michael Kamerling won the Lifesaving Award for his actions Sept. 21, when he observed a car that Essex police reported they were seeking. As Kamerling followed the car, state police said, it went off the road and struck a tree, catching on fire. Kamerling opened the driver’s door, unbuckled the unconscious driver and pulled him to safety.

Trooper First Class Robert Zink, Trooper Second Class Wayne Godfrey, Deputy Sheriff Joel Howard, Walter Gould of Bennington County, Albany Med Flight Officer Thomas Bull, Bennington Police Officer Anthony Silvestro, Bennington Police Detective Michael Plusch and Robin Breese of Bennington police were given the Lifesaving Award for their response to a car crash on Vermont 9 near the New York border. State police said the driver was trapped in the car and the group put out a fire and provided medical assistance.

Karen Bradley won the Commissioner’s Award for her role on the State Police Advisory Committee. She has served on the panel for more than 24 years, the last 16 as chairwoman before leaving to become a side judge.

Sgt. Stephen McNamara and Trooper First Class Peter Dempsey won the Director’s Award for their response to a burglary Nov. 17, 2008. State police said the suspect threatened the two with a golf club. The suspect was shot and surrendered.

Detective Sgt. Walter Smith, Detective Sgt. Charles Holden, Barre City Police Detective Hal Hayden were honored with the Director’s Award for their work on the 1982 murder of Pamela Brown in Barre. The three were credited with reviewing information and conducting new interviews following a match on the DNA database that led to the February arrest of Theodore Caron.

Adam Woodworth was given the Director’s Award for his work in developing the state’s new Amber Alert system.

Detective Trooper Amy Borsari was given the Division Commander’s Award for solving a case that involved the theft of a state police M-16 A1 rifle and ammunition out of a police car in August 2008. Borsari was credited with conducting an intense and difficult investigation that resulted in arrest.

ATF Special Agent in Charge James Mostyn won the Division Commander’s Award for his contributions to state police investigations.

LINK

Quem nunca ouviu falar de um treino carregando pedras no fundo do mar?

Pois ai está ele de novo, Garrett Mac Namara nos mostrando como se faz:

GetStokd – Underwater – www.garrettmcnamara. com

Aí vc entende porque o cara tem preparo de gigante…

Texto Original:

Hurricane Bill Surf – Full length Rhode Island Video – Ian Walsh, Garrett McNamara in HDwww.garrettmcnamara.com

Great quote of a quote out of Eugene Peterson’s “Working the Angles.”

One of the indignities to which pastors are routinely subjected is to be approached, as a group of people are gathering for a meeting or a meal, with the request, “Reverend, get things started for us with a little prayer, will ya?” It would be wonderful if we could counter by bellowing William McNamara’s fantasized response: “I will not! There are no little prayers! Prayer enters the lion’s den, brings us before the holy where it is uncertain whether we will come back alive or sane, for it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living God.’”

William McNamara, O.C.D., The Human Adventure (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Image Books, 1976), p. 89.

The death earlier this year of former secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara caused me to reflect on my brief time as a “whiz kid” in McNamara’s Systems Analysis office. SA was run by assistant secretary of defense Alain Enthoven, a quintessential whiz kid who was only 30 when he began his eight-year reign as the Pentagon’s “doubting Thomas.”

My own days as a minor whiz kid ran from July 1967 to March 1969, that is, from late in McNamara’s regime (January 21, 1961 – February 29, 1968), through the interregnum of Clark Clifford (March 1, 1968 – January 20, 1969), and into the early months of Nixon’s appointee, Melvin Laird (January 22, 1969 – January 29, 1973). SA’s influence dwindled sharply upon McNamara’s departure from the Pentagon, but SA had been very powerful until then, for three reasons.

First, of course, SA was a key ingredient of McNamara’s management
“revolution,” which came straight from the playbook of RAND — the Air Force’s influential think-tank. McNamara recruited Charles Hitch from RAND to serve as comptroller of the Department of Defense. Hitch — a leading proponent of the use of planning, programming, and budgeting systems (PPBS) and co-author of the “bible” of systems analysis, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age — brought with him Alain Enthoven, who began as deputy assistant aecretary of defense for systems analysis in 1961 and was elevated to assistant secretary of defense for SA in 1965. (For a recounting of McNamara’s love affair with RAND-ites and their techniques, see “Early RAND and the McNamara Revolution,” which begins on p. 4 of the RAND Review, Fall 1998. A Time magazine piece from 1962 about McNamara’s “whiz kids” profiles five top McNamara aides, including two RAND-ites, Enthoven and Henry Rowen.)

A second, closely related reason for SA’s power was its central position in McNamara’s decision process. SA exercised its power mainly through the so-called draft presidential memorandum (DPM). DPMs, which originated in SA, took the form of lengthy memos from the secretary of defense to the president, none of which — as far as I know — actually went to the president. DPMs were, in fact, vehicles for obtaining and recording McNamara’s decisions on major program issues. Each DPM treated a broad set of issues (e.g., force structure, force mix, manning levels, major procurement programs) in a particular mission area (e.g., strategic forces; tactical air forces, naval forces, and land forces). For each of the dozen or so issues addressed in a DPM (e.g., the number and mix of amphibious ships), the responsible SA analyst(s) would (in about a page) summarize the sponsoring service’s proposed program and the analytical basis for the service’s position, criticize the service’s analysis (usually by focusing on critical but debatable assumptions and the inevitable uncertainty of cost estimates), briefly discuss alternatives (almost always less ambitious and expensive than the service’s proposal), recommend one of them, and give a tabular comparison of the alternatives, using simple figures of merit chosen for the purpose of making the recommended alternative look good. (We called it “tablesmanship.”) The coup de grace often would be a “clinching” reason for approving SA’s recommended (less-expensive) alternative (e.g., the unlikelihood of another amphibious assault on the scale of the landing at Inchon, given the location of approved planning scenarios). DPMs would be sent to the services and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) for comment. After some back and forth, decision versions would go up to McNamara, who almost always chose the alternatives recommended by SA.

In sum, we SA civilians played “gotcha.” We did it because we were encouraged to do it, though not in so many words. And we got away with it, not because we were better analysts — most of our work was simplistic stuff — but because we usually had the last word. (Only an impassioned personal intercession by a service chief might persuade McNamara to go against SA — and the key word is “might.”) The irony of the whole process was that McNamara, in effect, substituted “civilian judgment” for oft-scorned “military judgment.” McNamara revealed his preference for “civilian judgment” by elevating Enthoven and SA a level in the hierarchy, 1965, even though (or perhaps because) the services and JCS had been open in their disdain of SA and its snotty young civilians.

A third reason for SA’s power, and its ability to play “gotcha,” was the essential lack of structure in the Department of Defense’s PPBS. For all of the formality and supposed rigor of the system, it lacked an essential ingredient: budget constraints against which the services could submit realistic program proposals. Budget constraints had existed de facto under Eisenhower and were to exist de jure under Nixon. In fact, Melvin Laird introduced a decision process built around fiscal constraints soon after taking office, on the recommendation of a former subordinate of Enthoven’s who stayed on as acting assistant secretary for about a year into Laird’s regime.

In any event, because McNamara didn’t give the services budget targets, the services were effectively encouraged to ask for a lot more than they could get. That incentive was reinforced by the reorientation of the defense program toward “flexible response” in the 1960s. Each service, naturally, sought a piece of the new action, and — lacking fiscal guidance — each of them did the sensible thing by asking for a lot more than it was likely to get. Under such a system, SA was bound to look good, and SA analysts were bound to make the services look bad by playing “gotcha.” It turns out that I didn’t have the stomach for it, which is why I left SA after 20 increasingly depressing months.

And that brings me to the players and their “tone.” What did the SA staff look like?

- There were a lot of youngish civilians, like me, who were bereft of military service and may never have seen a military unit or military equipment, except in a parade. Many of the young civilians had Harvard MBAs, and they were notorious, even within SA, for their brashness and rudeness.

- There was a smaller cadre of lightly less-young civilians, imported from other parts of DoD and the defense industry. Their SA experience lent them a certain cachet that they could trade on for advancement in government and industry.

- There were many junior officers with ROTC commissions who had deferred their active service to pursue graduate degrees. Because of those degrees, they were snatched up by SA instead of being sent to Vietnam. They were really civilians, at heart, who happened to carry military ranks.

- Most of the major components of SA had one or two “service reps” — senior officers nominated by the services. Some of them were dead-enders with nothing to lose (which worked against their sponsoring services). Others (notably the Navy reps) were rising stars who (a) tried to keep SA “honest” and (b) kept their sponsoring services informed of what SA was up to.

- The higher echelons were populated by “seasoned” civilians, with military analysis experience at places like RAND and the aerospace industry. One such senior civilian exemplified the tone of SA. He wrote a white paper in which he discussed (among other things) the role of amphibious forces in defense strategy. In the course of that discussion, he pointedly and sneeringly referred to amphibious forces as “ambiguous forces.”

In my 20 months at the Pentagon, I came to understand the essential difference between Systems Analysis, as it was in McNamara’s day, and outfits like the Operations Evaluation Group, a Navy-sponsored civilian organization. SA, to put it baldly, existed to work against the services. OEG, by contrast, existed (and exists) to work with a service, to help it make the best use of its forces and systems. There is no doubt in my mind that the contributions of OEG were (and are) far more valuable to the nation’s defense than the “contributions” of SA, which may well have harmed it.

Analysis per se is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It’s like a loaded gun, in that its goodness or badness depends on who wields it and for what purpose.

O Blog da Mafia não cansa de homenagear Maya Gabeira.

Lógico que o Carlos Burle tbm merece nossas legítimas homenagens e, com certeza, tem influencia na brlilhante Carreira da Maya…

Titulo:

OS MELHORES “SURFISTAS” DO MUNDO – “MAYA GABEIRA” e “CARLOS BURLE”

Na gringa:

At only 22 years old, Maya Gabeira has broken into the boys club of big wave surfing and is a dominant presence in the women’s field.

and doing it…

É dela a primeira onda do clip oficial da Billa no u tube…

Fica, mais uma vez, a homenagem a maior surfista que o Brasil já teve, não desmerecendo as competidoras, mas ela esta com muito destaque no cenário mundial.

Olha esse outro, num video de caldos, com locução do Garret Mcnamara, aos 0:58 seg, aparece a onda de Maya, sem wipe out!!!

Titulo: Surviving a Big Wave Wipe Out

A few days ago I was watching an episode of ‘Democracy Now!’. It was an interview with Jonathan Schell (journalist), Howard Zinn (historian) and Marilyn Young (Vietnam War historian). They were discussing the death of Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense of the United States from 1961-1968) and his legacy, specifically, his legacy regarding his involvement in the Vietnam War. Just now, I was reading the transcript and something Zinn said stood out to me. It was in regards to how, despite McNamara’s personal struggle and anguish over Vietnam, he never publicly spoke out against it while it was happening. Zinn said this:

Yeah. You know, I was listening to Jonathan Schell and Marilyn Young about McNamara’s—well, his anguish and all of that, and I understand what Jonathan is saying about the fact that you can’t find anybody in the Vietnam War or in other wars, anybody at that level, you know, who is going to do anything in dissent and who’s going to speak out. And so, what does that tell us? I mean, it’s true. It’s absolutely true. But what does that tell us?

I think it tells us that once you enter the machinery of government, once you enter the—you know, the house of empire, you are lost. You are going to be silenced. You may feel anguish, and you may be torn, and you may weep, and so on, but you’re not going to speak out. And what lesson I think that is for us, well, for young people, who may be thinking, as many young people do, you know, “I think I’ll enter the government. I’ll get in there, and I’ll make a difference”? No, the people who made a difference are not the people inside the Pentagon. The people who made a difference were the people outside the Pentagon, the people who demonstrated against the Pentagon, the people in the streets, the movement. And if people are going to devote their energy to making this a better world, they better not think of getting into that machine that destroyed people like McNamara and that silenced them.

I’m not saying I agree or disagree with it. It’s just something to dwell on and think about. Immediately after this, Jonathan Schell mentions that there’s a contrast to this line of thinking, specifically the case of Daniel Ellsberg, who was in the system and released The Pentagon Papers. Anyways, point being: Zinn’s comment, I think, is an interesting little piece of his personal wisdom regarding the effectiveness of dissent versus trying to change the system from the inside. Just something to dwell on.

A moment of silence is in order.

War is always a tragic thing, but on this very day sixty four years ago a particularly harsh thing happened. One of the sides in the biggest war the world had ever known turned its weapons away from opposing soldiers, and turned them instead on civilians. Just one button was pressed, and within just minutes 66,000 children, babies, teenagers, grandparents, adults, cats, dogs, rabbits, horses, mice, birds, everything – were all burned alive. Within a matter of days the number of deaths rose to 900,000 civilians. Who could be so cruel, so sadistic, to kill nearly a million civilians?

We could. The United States of America.

On August 6, 1945, the United States became the first country to use a nuclear weapon by dropping the first atomic bomb. We killed everything and everyone in Hiroshima, Japan.

Gen. Curtis E. LeMay of the Army’s Air Forces said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense, said “I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — we’re behaving as war criminals.” At the time it was thought that the atomic bomb would be such a destructive force that it would cause Japan to surrender the war quickly, thus preventing further war casualties on both sides. In fact that was correct. But no one correctly predicted the number of deaths and the long-term impact. The bomb was far more destructive than anyone anticipated.

The country of Japan has taught the world one of its most important lessons: violence is not the path to peace.

Jane Burgermeister has filed a law suit in Vienna against the WHO, UN, FBI, and a who’s who of government officials in an effort to substantiate her claim that Swine Flu, A/H1N1 was man made, an intentional means of mass inoculation, and a population reduction campaign.You can follow her at http://birdflu666/wordpress.com or on the Facebook Group- End Forced Vaccinations at http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=102894871603

Someone in America has come up with a fill in the blank lawsuit for the American judicial system to file charges, that the Swine Flu H1N1 is a biological weapon.  pdf- http://www.lepouvoirmondial.com/media/00/00/632581178.pdf  and at Scribd.  http://www.scribd.com/full/17044758?access_key=key-ypdpmkfrlip1gi3rqgo

The Document in its current presentation titled, ”Criminal charges regarding flu pandemic as a biological weapon with intent to produce genocide,” would be thrown out of court immediately just based on procedure alone and begins begins by stating., “I am a citizen of the United States and would like to file criminal charges against….” 

I am a citizen of the United States and would like to hit the lottery.  I don’t see that happening either.  The document does make some good points as to the alarming course of events of Swine Flu, government and pharmaceutical intervention and reaction. 

“Imagine the potential for disaster if even one batch [ sic. of vaccines]was infected and distributed to thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, who would not only become ill themselves but also act as incubators of a new more lethal virus.  A forced vaccination of the entire population could mean death on a scale never seen before on Earth.” 

Even if a plaintiff here or in anywhere in the world were to get a day in court, it would take years before an outcome was reached.  What compensation would be just, should the court determine that:

• 1.  Swine Flu was lab created 
• 2.  Pharmaceutical companies intentionally colluded
• 3.  Mass genocide was intended

No more than a slap on the wrist would be found to be the proper punishment already witness:

• 1.  Baxter admitted to releasing live Avian Flu viruses with no punishment, only a promise to increase biosecurtiy
• 2. Plenty of physicians and pharmaceutical employees sit on various government run policy groups with no accusation of bias
• 3.  Project Human Beings First admits,  “The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary eco-systems is becoming appallingly evident.” http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/12/pop-control-mcnamara-rockefeller-aids.html

Related post http://ahrcanum.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/swine-flu-conspiracy-goes-to-court-jane-burgermeister/

Open wide, say ahhh and check out these posts on the A/H1N1 Swine Flu Report from Ahrcanum where the conspiracy spreads as fast as the virus itself.  http://ahrcanum.wordpress.com/swine-flu-report/

Game One

In our first game, we get one hot off the Presses at Biel 2009:

[Event "Biel 2009"]
[Date "2009.07.28"]
[White "Alexander Morozevich"]
[Black "Maxime Vachier-Lagrave"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "B80"]

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. f3 e6 7. Be3 b5 8. Qd2 Nbd7 9. g4 h6 10. O-O-O b4 11. Nce2 Qc7 12. h4 d5 13. Nf4 e5 14. Nfe6!

This is not the first time Vachier-Lagrave has stepped on a land mine opponent preparation.  Nakamura demolished him spectacularly with homework in the Benko Gambit at Cap D’Agde, 2009.  Having sharp, narrow repetoires makes it fairly easy for nasty accidents to occur.

14… fxe6 15. Nxe6 Qa5 16. exd5 Qxa2 17. Qd3 Kf7 18. g5 Nxd5 19. Bh3 Nxe3 20. Nd8+ Ke7 21. Nc6+ Kf7 22. g6+?

This was the first golden chance to put away the young French player who so far, had just been carried along by the tide.

22. Be6+!!

This would have been one of the best games of 2009

Position after 22. Be6+!! (analysis)

It’s a chessic shame that Moro missed this amazing, deep shot.

22…Kxe6 (clearly 22…Qxe6 23. Nd8+ wins)  23. Qg6+ Nf6 24. gxf6 gxf6 25. Qe8+ Kf5 26.  Nd4+!! Kf4 27. Ne2+ Kf5 28. Ng3+ Kf4 29. Nh5+!

This is a fantastic pendulum!

Pendulum .... Guillotine

29…Kxf3 (29… Kf5 30. Rd4 Qa1+ 31. Kd2 wins) 30. Qc6+ e4 31. Qxf6+ Bf5 32. Rh3+ Kg2 33. Rh2+ Kf3 34. Rf1+ Nxf1 35. Qxf5+ Ke3 36. Qf2 mate!   This would have been a fitting end to the game.  Of course, it’s a Caissic horror that Moro goes on to miss a more banal and crude win on move 26.  Pauvre Moro.

22… Kg8 23. Qxe3 Bc5 24. Qe4 Nf8 25. Rd8 Bb7 26. Rxa8? Another big miscue.   White had the rather crude 26. Rxf8+! Rxf8 (26… Kxf8 27. Qf5+ Ke8 28. Qxe5+ wins; 26…Bxf8 27. Qxe5 hits c5 and threatens Be6+, this wins too.   If 27. Qxe5 Bc8, 28. Qe8! mates!  Let’s play over the rest of the sickness without comment because I want you to compare the positions arising from 22. Be6+!! to Game 2!

26… Bxa8 27. h5 Rh7 28. Re1 (28. gxh7!+ Kh8 29. Kd2) 28… Bxc6 29. Qxc6 Bd4 30. Kd2 Qxb2 31. Qc4+ Kh8 32. Kd3 a5 33. Qc8 Qa3+ 34. Ke4 b3 35. cxb3
a4 36. Rb1 Qb4 37. Qc4 Qb7+ 38. Qd5 Qb4 39. Qc4 Qd2 40. Bg4 a3 41. Qf7 Qc2+ 42. Kd5 Qc5+ 43. Ke4 a2 44. Rc1 a1=Q 45. Rxc5 Bxc5 46. Qd5 Qe1+ 47. Kd3 Qd1+ 48.
Kc4 Qxd5+ 49. Kxd5 Ba3 50. Bf5 Kg8 51. Kxe5 Rh8 52. Kd5 Nh7 53. gxh7+ Kf7 54. Bg6+ Kf6 55. f4 Bc1 56. f5 Bd2 57. Kd6 Be1 58. Kd7 Bb4 59. Kc7 Ke5 60. Kd7 Ba3
61. Kc6 Kd4 62. Kc7 Kc3 63. Kd7 Kb4 64. Kd6 Kxb3+ 65. Kd5 Bb2 66. Kd6 Bf6 67. Kc5 Kc3 68. Kd6 Kd4 69. Kc6 Rd8 70. Kb6 Kd5 71. Kc7 Kc5 72. Bf7 g5 73. fxg6 Rd6
74. Be8 Be5 75. Kb7 Rb6+ 76. Kc8 Kd6 0-1

Game 2

Here’s the Doppelganger, note the very curious positions of the Kings.

IM Ginsburg – NM Jack Young, New England 199?

Dutch Defense, Sjödin Gambit

1. d4 e6 2. Nf3 f5 3. e4 fxe4 4. Ng5!?

The strange Sjödin Gambit (so named, as explained to me by GM Ferdinand Hellers, after a Swedish amateur player). Sjödin is a tough word to pronounce! It’s something like “Shuhhh-DEEN.” Joel Benjamin tried this move versus a Russian 2400+ and was successful, although his game was not without chances for black.

4…Nf6 5. f3

5…exf3

Black must seriously consider 5…h6 6. Nh3, one of the main alternatives to drive the menacing WN offside. In addition, I think Joel’s opponent played 5…c5!? to challenge the dark squares and got a good game; the trick is 6. fxe4 cxd4 7. e5?? Qa5+! picking up the e5-pawn.

6. Qxf3 Nc6 7. Bd3?

7. c3 was circumspect. The wild text move is unsound. But if it had not been played, we wouldn’t have the following (possibly unique? – see below) crazy game. Them’s the breaks.

7…Nxd4 Of course. If your opponent hangs center pawns, take them.

8. Qh3 d5! Refuting white’s coffeehouse antics.

9. Nxh7 Nxh7 10. Bxh7 Nxc2+ 11. Ke2 Kd7!

Very convincing. White has very few resources left.

12. Rf1 Nxa1 13. Rf7+ Kc6?! A fairly easy win is 13…Be7 14. Bg5 Re8 15. Qc3 b6 and white runs out of steam. Black is still winning after the text, but he’ll need to find a tough move shortly.

14. Qc3+ Kb6 15. Be3+ c5 16. b4 At least white is making a little trouble now. The game is starting to take on very strange overtones. Watch the black king double back now and head into the center!

16…d4?

Finally black goes wrong. The difficult deflection, using a ‘doomed piece’, 16…Nb3!! still wins. For example, 17. axb3 d4! and white doesn’t have the b2 queen check as in the game. Or, 17. Qxb3 Bd7 18. bxc5++ Kc7 and black wins as well.

17. bxc5+ Bxc5 18. Qb2+ Kc6 19. Nc3? Too fancy, I was carried away. Correct is 19. Be4+! Kd6 20. Bxd4 and white wins.

19…Qb6? 19…dxc3 loses simply to 20. Be4+ Kd6 21. Bxc5+ Kxc5 22. Qxc3+ Kb6 23. Qb4+ Ka6 24. Rxb7 and mates. Black needed to play 19…a6! to take b5 away from white. For example, 20. Be4+ Kd6 21. Bf4+ e5 and there’s nothing more white can do. Now white is back on track again.

20. Be4+ Kd6 21. Nb5+ Ke5 22. Bf3!

Black’s king finds himself in a really bizarre mating net. His attempts to avoid it just lead the game into more and more surrealistic situations without changing the verdict: black’s king is trapped and cannot wriggle free. Enjoy this sideline: 22. Kd3! Rh4 23. Bf2 Rf4 24. Bg3 g5 25. Bxf4+ gxf4 26. Bc6!! (protecting the N on b5 temporarily is an important point)

Position after 26. Bc6!! (Analysis)

26…Qxc6 27. Qe2+ Kd5 28. Qe4 mate!

Or this, even more amusing: 22. Kd3! Rh4 23. Bf2 Rxe4 24. Kc4!!! and mate is forced in 10 moves! It’s really strange to have both kings participating in the center in the middlegame, with one king sealing the mating net on the other. Perhaps it’s unique in the history of chess!?? (readers??) Can you imagine this game played in the 19th century and some bearded fellow such as Steinitz announcing Mate in 10 in a grovelly voice?

Position after 24. Kc4!!! (Analysis) – Unique Tableau?

Here’s one of the shorter mates from this position: 24…g5 25. Bg3+ Rf4 26. Qe2 mate.

22…Rh4 23. g4! Caveman chess, brutally effective. White doesn’t need his queen anymore.

23…g5 24. Bxg5 Rxh2+ 25. Kd1 Rxb2 26. Bf4 mate

Not quite a pure mate; the N on b5 is not needed (guarding d6 twice).

It’s always nice to end a game with a queen sacrifice. This game was really way out there in deep orbit. It doesn’t stand up to serious analysis, but it did produce some unique situations.

1-0

If Moro had found 22. Be6+, there would have been a whole set of weird similarities between the two games!  Alas, Vachier-Lagrave (the modern day Dus-Chortimirski, bad openings and resourceful fighting in middlegame) went on to carry the day.

Some More Blitz

Let’s take our mind off the previous absurdities with two absurd blitz games.

Aries2(IM) – Smallville(GM) ICC 5 minute game, March 2009.   ‘Smallville” is Nakamura’s ICC alias.

1. e4 a6 2. d4 h6 Don’t worry, the game returns to normal channels soon.

3. Nc3 e6 4. Nf3 b5 A truly hypermodern opening.  White hits upon a good blitz plan of getting a minor piece near black’s king.

5. a4 b4 6. Ne2 Bb7 7. Ng3! One exclamation point covering moves 5 to 7.  When playing a stronger player, it is incumbent to try to mate!

7…d5 8. Bd3 Nf6 9. Qe2 Nbd7?! 9…dxe4 is correct with a fully acceptable game. At this point,  after black’s actual 9th move 10. e5! is obviously strong and I can’t explain why I didn’t do it.

10. O-O?! c5! Now the game is double-edged.

11. exd5 Bxd5 12. Re1 Qc8 13. b3 cxd4 14. Nxd4 Bc5 15. Ndf5 O-O White to play.  Is the sacrifice on g7 correct?

Sacrifice? Yes, it is time.

16. Nxg7! Answer:  yes it is correct, because black’s king doesn’t have very many defenders at the moment.  But this is a good tactical quiz position, because some of the follow-up lines are not totally straightforward.

16…Kxg7 17. Bxh6+? The wrong way to do it.  As a GM kibitzer told me immediately after the game, 17. Nh5+! is right.   Black cannot take that knight due to forced checkmate.  17. Nh5+! Nxh5? and now 18. Bxh6+! (a clever move inversion from the game) forces mate.  So on 17. Nh5+, the black king must move.  17…Kh8?! 18. Nxf6 Nxf6 19. Bb2 looks insanely risky, so that leaves 17…Kg8.   In that case, the computer thinks black holds on after 18. Bxh6 Qd8! 17.  Rad1 Kh8! but it’s really necessary in blitz to make black find all these moves.

17…Kh8 18. Nh5?? This is an even worse lemon.  18. Bxf8 Qxf8 19. Be4 and both sides have chances.  Now black assumes the attack and white is lost.

Rg8 19. Nf4 Qc6 {White resigns} C’est la vie.
0-1

Curtains(IM)-aries2(IM)

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Be7 4. c3 Nf6 5. d3 O-O 6. O-O d6 7. Bb3 Be6 8. Re1 8. Bxe6 fxe6 9. Qb3 Qc8 is all right for black.

8…Bxb3 9. Qxb3 Rb8 10. d4 Nd7?! 10…Qd7 and 10…a6 are less clumsy.

11. Na3 Bf6 12. Be3 a6 13. d5 Ne7 14. Ba7 Nc5 If I was white, I’d just take that horse and get a structural edge.

Snap the Horse

15. Qd1(?! but white gets another chance next move) Rc8 16. b4 Same comment; I’d snap off the horse on c5 and be happy.

16…Nd7 17. Be3 Ng6 18. c4 Nh4? Weak.  18…Be7 is solid and fine.  Black can get counterplay on the queenside with a later c6 and/or a5.

19. c5 Nxf3+ 20. Qxf3 Bg5 21. Nc4 Bxe3 22. Qxe3 Qe7 23. c6 bxc6 24. dxc6 Nf6 25. a4 Rb8 26. Rab1 Qe6 27. Qd3 Nxe4? Not good, but exciting and leading us to the fabulous quiz position after black’s 31st.  Just the normal 27…Rfd8 to keep going.

28. Qxe4 d5 29. Qxe5 dxc4 30. Qxc7 Rxb4 31. Rbd1 Qf6 This is a great tactical quiz position, pretty much impossible for humans to solve in blitz.

Quiz Time

32. Rd6?? Correct is the rather difficult 32. Qd7! Rc2 33. Qd4! getting a winning ending.  The deep point (hard to work out in blitz) is that 33…c3 34. Qxf6 gxf6 35. Rc1 Rb3 36. Re3! uses all pieces to maximum effect breaking black’s resistance.

Another variation that pulls up lame but hard to fully see in blitz is 32. Rc1? c3 33. Qd7 (too late!) Rc4! 34. c7 Qf4! and the pawn on c7 is lost!

The text gives black an unexpected loophole.  So unexpected that I blitz out a weak reply not exploiting my chance.

32…Qc3?? When presented with a gift horse… well, find out about the gift!   32…Qe5!! leads to a black edge after 33. Rf1 c3; 33. Red1?? just loses to 33…c3.  33. Red1?? c3 34. Qc8 is a typical last-ditch attempt, but it’s rudely met by 34…Qxd6! using white’s back rank yet again.  Positions with mutually weak bank ranks and mutually threatening passed pawns are the sharpest in the pantheon of heavy piece middlegames!  Now all is silence.

33. Qe7 g6 34. c7 {Black resigns} 1-0

Postscript – US Car History

Some curious stuff I learned about the Ford Edsel. The more diverse factoids a chess player knows, the better he or she is off?!?!

Quoting from the Time.Com “50 Worst Cars of All Time” story,

“That’s why we’re all here, right? To celebrate E Day, the date 50 years ago when Ford took one of the autodom’s most hilarious pratfalls. But why? It really wasn’t that bad a car. True, the car was kind of homely, fuel thirsty and too expensive, particularly at the outset of the late ’50s recession. But what else? It was the first victim of Madison Avenue hyper-hype. Ford’s marketing mavens had led the public to expect some plutonium-powered, pancake-making wondercar; what they got was a Mercury. Cultural critics speculated that the car was a flop because the vertical grill looked like a vagina. Maybe. America in the ’50s was certainly phobic about the female business. How did the Edsel come to be synonymous with failure? All of the above, consolidated into an irrational groupthink and pressurized by a joyously catty media. Interestingly, it was Ford President Robert McNamara who convinced the board to bail out of the Edsel project; a decade later, it was McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, who couldn’t bring himself to quit the disaster of Vietnam, even though he knew a lemon when he saw one.”

Change of Pace Poll

McNamara throwing Masonic gang hand signals

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
-Revelation 6:8

What can you say about this man ? You could literally fill a book with tales of this armchair warrior’s arrogant  and uncaring mass slaughter of his fellow man, friend or foe.Why didn’t he just stick to building cars ?

Now it turns out he is responsible for approving the development of the AIDS virus, so McNamara will continue killing,reaching our from byond the grave…if there is a Hell, then McNamara’s God, Lucifer, will be saving a place of honour for him.

Is McNamara even really dead ? When you are that high up in the Illuminati you have access to life extension technology ; they just fake your death and patch you up with Frankenstein parts and you keep on rolling…the fact that he requested no service and no funeral may be a clue….according to Tony Brown of PBS, McNamara is actually the Big Boss of the  Illuminati.. I guess if anyone has ‘earned their bones’ , it’s this guy ; 3 million North Vietnamese, hundreds of thousand of Japanese civilians that were purposefully targeted during the firebombing of Tokyo< more died there than from the Nukes that were dropped later. He even has the gaul to admit that he is a war criminal ! It’s hard to imagine he was simply a Rothschild puppet, a civil servant just following orders…it seems he was steeped in occultism…a Lucis Trust devotee, he used to be seen praying to the full moon on the White House lawn, presumably a high level Mason, notice his nickname the ARCHITECT of the Viet Name war, very Masonic.

His mother did not want him raised Catholic as most Irish are, by the way, what is this man’s bloodline ? Is the Strange family on his mother’s side part of the Strong family ? Are they perhaps Jewish ? Or is McNamara’s story the same as in the movie Skulls, where the protagonist, Luke McNamara, manages to get recruited into Skull and Bones even though he comes from humble beginnings ? Could he be related to the McNamara’s in Ireland, the warrior class for the O’Briens who , after fending off Viking and Norman invasions for 600 years, were finally fought to a standoff and agreed to become Protestant and pay tribute to the British Monarchy in exchange for the promise of keeping their landholdings ? The McNamara’s drove their cousins, the Kennedy’s off their ancestral land back in the middle ages because the Kennedy’s were siding with the invading Normans, who were funded by Jewish bankers from England, hence the longstanding relationship the Kennedy’s have with the Fitzgerald’s, a Norman family. In the book When Scottland was Jewish it is claimed that the Kennedy’s are of Jewish extraction ; this would not surprise me, the Jews were expelled from England and many of them would have gone to Scotland and Ireland and done their usual schtick of Usurious lending to impoverish everyone around but themselves. The McNamara’s are indeed a warrior tribe , the Coat of Arms background is red, indicating ‘no quarter’, so in that sense, Robert Strange would be a hero of sorts to his fellow clansmen. There is also a lion on the shield, but there are no lions in Ireland ; could the McNamara’s be descendent of the tribe of Judah ?

 The McNamara’s sacred tree is the Holly tree ; of Hollywood fame, in fact, the tribes original name was ClanCullen, a place name which means Clan Holly; could that be where the word Holy comes from ? Readers of this blog might be interested to know that the Illuminati name Collins originates from the Irish word Culliean, which means Holly. There is an ancient legend that the death of a McNamara will be preceeded by a runaway team of horses, perhaps a horse drawn hearse that will make a loud ruckus as it tears through the village, that is an omen that a McNamara will die soon…and it is noted in the Bible that the snorting of horses will be heard from Dan, are the McNamara’s part of the Tuatha de Danaan ? The anti-christ will arise from the tribe of Dan since that tribe was not included as being under God’s protection during the apocalypse that is prophecied in Revelations.

Genesis 49:16-18 “Dan shall judge his people as one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that bites the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward. I have waited for your salvation, O LORD.”

Pale Rider

In the Bible we can understand that God judges his people by Dan, the proof of this is eg. And Jacob called his sons and said, �Gather together, that I may tell you what shall befall you in the last days… Dan shall judge his people as one of the tribes of Israel. Dan shall be a serpent (satan) by the way, a viper by the path, that bites the horse�s heels so that its rider shall fall backward. (Gen.49:1,16-17)
Then Rachel said, �God has judged my case; and He has also heard my voice and given me a son.� Therefore she called his name Dan.(Gen.30:6) The name Dan means “he judged”.
For a voice declares from Dan and proclaims affliction from Mount Ephraim… Destruction upon destruction is cried, for the whole land is plundered… For thus says the LORD: �The whole land shall be desolate; Yet I will not make a full end…. (Jer.4:15,20,27)

The tribe of Dan is missing from the list of the 144 000 Jews sealed in Rev.7:4-8. This tribe commits a serious crime! The truth is that the children of Dan were very violent and bad people and worshiped an carved image, see Judges 18:27-31, but can also be “the man of sin” of their descendants? How serious! You know the story of Samson? Samson was the tribe of Dan (see Jue.13:2,25). He was a Nazirite (was not allowed to take wine, cut hair, or touch a dead body). Merovingian kings who reigned in France during the years 476-750 were known of their long hair, they believed they are descendants of Dan. Today, it is believed mistakenly that the Merovingians have holy blood, basing this on the lie that “Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married”. For us who know the truth, it means the blood of the Antichrist. It’s said the descendants of Dan today live especially in Ireland, Scotland (Celts) and Denmark (Danmark). This effort theory that the Antichrist would come from Britain.

http://www.hope-of-israel.org/i000035a.htm

Was McNamara involved or in the loop on the Kennedy assassination ? He said he was in the Pentagon when he call a call from Bobby Kennedy, but McNamara said he “didn’t know what to do”, so he carried on with his meeting..and apparently he send Bundy of the Illuminati Bundy family over to the White House to run things until Texas Crypto Jew Johnson could get there and cancel the printing of the non-Federal Reserve notes that Kennedy ordered printed up. Ironic that when McNamara was at Ford he had the Lincoln redesigned, and Kennedy was using one of those redesigned Lincolns the day he was killed instead of the usual Cadillac that Presidents normally use. And McNamara’s second wife has some coincidental ties to the CIA/Mafia creeps who’s name’s keep popping up in the Kennedy murder investigation. See this link:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/lofiversion/index.php/t14538.html

The Death Coach is associated with the Tuatha de Danaan (Tribe of Dan), as well as the Banshees who foretell a death and also the Fairy people. it is piloted by headless horsemen, I wonder if  there were an event that foretold the death of Body Count Bob recently ?

Tuatha de Danaan ; Tribe of Dan ; Death Coach

The death coach is part of the folklore of north western Europe. It is particularly strong in Ireland but is also found in British and American culture. In Irish folklore, it is known as the Cóiste Bodhar (chost-a-bower) and it is said that the sight or sound of the coach is the harbinger of death. It warns of imminent death to either oneself or to a close relative. ^[1] In Ireland in particular the Death Coach is seen as a signifier of the inevitability of death, as the belief goes once it has come to Earth it can never return empty. Thus, once the death of an individual has been decided by a greater power, mortals may do nothing to prevent it.

The driver Cóiste Bodhar is said to be a headless horseman, called the Dullahan.

In Clare, at sight or sound of the coach, all gates should be thrown open, and then it will not stop at the house to call for a member of the family, but only fortell the death of some relative at a distance.

It seems that McNamara , who was a Republican, not a Democrat like Kennedy, and who, despite having an Irish last name, was not a Roman Catholic, but a pseudo-Presbyterian but really a Lucifer’s Trust Theosophist,and who was clearly a high level Mason, is the one who re-designed the Lincoln Continental ; Kennedy’s “Death Coach”. And let’s not forget the unique horse-drawn carriage used to transport Kennedy’s body at his funeral; shades of Dan’s snorting horses.

The Fog of War

A principios de este mes murió Robert McNamara, el que fuera Secretario de Estado de Defensa con Kennedy y Johnson durante la guerra de Vietnam. Un personaje para el que el adjetivo maquiavélico parece hecho a medida. Digo lo de personaje en el sentido histórico y no el despectivo, y por maquiavélico no entiendo algo necesariamente malo, como suele hacerse.

McNamara también fue presidente de la Ford y del Banco Mundial, pero ciertamente su papel en la política militar de los años sesenta es por lo que más se le recuerda. Nos hemos encontrado con este documental, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, y parece interesante escuchar las opiniones uno de los artífices de la Teoría del Dominó y cuyas ideas han ido evolucionando hasta ser un partidario del desarme nuclear.

Fog of war,  niebla de la guerra, es una expresión de von Clausewitz, (original: Nebel des Krieges) que alude a la incertidumbre que se da en los conflictos bélicos, debido al desconocimiento de las propias capacidad y la del adversario. La guerra es más póquer que ajedrez.

La película se estructura en once “lecciones”:

1. Hay que empatizar con el enemigo

2. La racionalidad no nos salvará

3. Hay algo más allá de uno mismo

4. Maximizar la eficiencia

5. La proporcionalidad debe ser una guía para la guerra

6. Conseguir datos

7. Lo que creemos y lo que vemos, a menudo no es cierto

8. Hay que estar dispuesto a volver a examinar tus razonamientos

9. Para hacer el bien, puede que tengas que hacer el mal

10. Nunca digas nunca jamás

11. No se puede cambiar la naturaleza humana

Hay varias cosas que me han llamado la atención, como el hecho de que el recuerdo más antiguo que McNamara conservaba fuera el de los soldados estadounidenses que volvían victoriosos de la Gran Guerra, cuando el contaba con tan sólo dos años. También cuenta su paso por la universidad en la época de la Gran Depresión, y el curioso dato de que su segundo nombre fuera Strange (en inglés: extraño, raro – era el apellido de soltera de su madre).

Toca aspectos interesantes de la guerra con Japón y llega a decir “si hubieramos perdido la guerra nos hubieran juzgado como criminales de guerra. Y es cierto, nos comportamos como criminales de guerra”, que es algo muy difícil de escuchar de un estadounidense. Esto enlaza con la idea de proporcionalidad (4.) Por cierto, que he caído en la cuenta, de que muy probablemente debido a Hiroshima y Nagasaki, el bombardeo sobre Tokio del 10 de marzo de 1945 (con armas convencionales, es decir, no nucleares) es un hecho histórico que pasa demasiado desapercibido, a pesar de su dramatismo (más de 100.000 muertos).

La crisis de los misiles cubanos. Cree que el mundo estuvo al borde del conflicto nuclear. Es sorprendente que hasta 1992 no llegara a conocer la cantidad de las armas que la URSS había instalado en Cuba. Respecto a la escalada de armamento y al conflicto nuclear dice una gran frase. “En la guerra nuclear no hay curva de aprendizaje”. La racionalidad no podrá salvarnos. La combinación de la imperfección humana y el poder de las armas nucleares destruirá naciones.

Vietnam es la parte más interesante, debido a su cargo durante el conflicto. En el plano teórico acaba enlazando con su lección primera, “empatizar con el enemigo”. Dice que durante la crisis de los misiles cubabos conseguieron ponerse el lugar de los soviéticos, pero en Vietnam en cambio no. Los vietnamitas creían que trataban de sustituir a los franceses y luchaban por interés colonial,  en cambio los EEUU considerabanVietnam un elemento de la guerra fría, y no lo que era, una guerra civil. Cree que si Kennedy hubiera seguido vivo el desarrollo hubiera sido diferente y que Johnson estaba muy equivocado.

En conjunto es un documental muy interesante. Las decisiones que McNamara tomó o ayudó a tomar a lo largo de su vida política, supusieron la muerte de miles de personas, muchas de ellas compatriotas suyos. Es de alabar la capacidad intelectual de un hombre que al final de su vida reconoce haberse equivocado y la valentía de estar dispuesto a hablar sobre ello. Quién sabe si su contribución al desarrollo del cinturón de seguridad cuando fue presidente de Ford no le redimirán por el resto.

Het overlijden, bijna een week geleden, van Robert McNamara heeft her en der tot boeiende beschouwingen geleid. Die verdienen wat mij betreft enige aandacht op de zaterdagavond.

McNamara gaat de geschiedenis in alsdeman diealsminister van defensie in de VS leiding gaf aan de Viewntam oorlog, erachter kwamdat die oorlog niet te winnen was,weggepromoveerd werd naar de Wereldbank waar hij de armoede mocht bestrijden, op zijn oude dag kritiek leverde opde kernwapenwedloop en spijt betuigde over de Vietnamoorlog waarin hij zo’n groot aandeel had gehad. We krijgen hiermee een beeld van een enigszins tragische figuur, een man die verkeerd deed maar daarover toch keurig sorry heeft gezegd . Maar dit beeld is te netjes, te lief voor McNamara.

Laten we de zaken eens langslopen, aan de hand van een uitvoerig In Memoriam dat de New York Times plaatste, en waar de NRC behulpzaam naar doorverwees. We zien hem daarin minister van defensie worden, en als furieus manager dat ministerie beheren. We zien hem leiding geven aan militaire operatiesen confrontatioes - niet alleen Vietnam, maar ook de mislukte invasie in Cuba, 1961 en de Cuba-crisis het jaar erop.

In die crisis – toen de VS bijna een wereldoorlog ontketende om Russische raketten van Cuba weg te krijgen – realiseerde McNamara zich dat  het woord ‘overwinning’ in een oorlog met kernwapens een woord zonder betekenis was: de verwoesting was gewoon te groot. Kernwapens  waren onbruikbare dingen waren, alleen geschikt om mee te dreigen, zoals hij dat later zei. Waarom er onder zijn leiding dan doorgegaan werdmet het maken en ontwikkelen van steedsmeer van die onbruikbare dingen, legt de Times dan weer niet uit.En pas in de jaren tachtig geeft McNamara echt in het openbaar blijk van zijn bezorgdheid over kernwapens.

Onder het ministerschap van McNamara vond ook een Amerikaanse invasie plaats in de Dominicaanse republiek in 1965. Daarover meldt de Times iets interessants. Het officiële excuus voor de invasie was, dat er Cubaanse agenten, communisten, actief waren in de regering die de VS wilde verdrijven. Voor jonge lezertjes: vandaag de dag voert de VS overal Al Qaeda-militanten aan als  het land ergens oorlog wil voeren; in de tijd van McNamara werd de rol van Al Qaeda ingenomen doorde Wereldwijde Communistische Samenzwering. Andere smoes, zelfde leugen. 

Maar McNamara had  in dit geval twijfels, hij zag geen bewijs. Hij zei dat tegen president Johnson. Die was echter overtuigd dat er wél een communistische samenzwering speelde, en zette de oorlog  tegen dat land dóór. Wat de Times er echter niet aan toevoegt:  McNamara – die als minister ook aan die operatie leiding gaf – vond het niet nodig om echt dwars te liggen. Hij had immers kunnen zeggen: mijnheer de president, zo’n invasie is onjuist, onwettig, en de argumentatie ervoor deugt niet, ik werk er niet aan mee. Maar nee.

Hij had voor echte dwarsliggerij natuurlijk ook geen tijd, hij moest immers de Vietnam-oorlog winnen. Die oorlog had hij als weinig anderen helpen aanjagen. Een belangrijke stap hierin was het zogeheten Golf van Tonkin-incident: een aanval van Noordvietnamese oorlogsschepen op Amerikaanse oorlogsschepenwerd het excuus dat  de VS hanteerde om tot grootschalige bombardementen over te gaan. Verwijzing naar het incident was ook een middel om snel een resolutie door het Congres aangenomen te krijgen waarmee  de president feitelijk de vrije hand kreeg tegen Vietnam.

Maar het incident  had helemaal niet plaatsgevonden. Het verhaal begon als misverstand, maar groeide uit tot bedrog – en McNamara  was één van de bedriegers. De New York Times vertelt ons dat niet. Die schrijft dat experts in de dienst die signalen afluisterden waardoor aan een aanval gedacht werd, dachten dat “het bewijs  voor een aanval spijkerhard was. ‘McNamara (…) had de president laten zien wat hij dacht dat bewijs was’, zegt Ray Cline, destijds onderdirecteur voor inlichtingen van de CIA. Hij voegde eraan toe ‘Het was precies wat Johnson zocht.’”

Maar zo was het niet. Gareth Porter laat aan de hand van archiefmateriaal zien dat de officier die deaanval in de golf van Tonkin meldde, zelf was gaan twijfelen of hij de signalen wel goed had geïnterpreteerd. De  admiraal in het gebied stelde aan McNamara vervolgens voor om even te wachten op de uitslag van nader onderzoek. McNamara drukte echter door: de geplande aanval moest doorgaan, voordat het onderzoek al duidelijkheid verschafte. Tegen de president deed McNamara alsof er geen serieuze twijfels over de aanval op een Amerikaans schip bestond, terwijl de minister wist dat die twijfel er was. De minister heeft hiermee de president op het verkeerde been gezet om de voorgenomen escalatie van de Vietnamoorlog van Johnsons steun te voorzien. McNamara knoeide bovendien met archiefmateriaal en verhulde zo dat relevante commandanten twijfelden aan het hele verhaal.

Zo kreeg McNamara zijn escalatie, zijn opgevoerde oorlog, die hij natuurlijk ging winnen. Dát dit zou lukken, leek een uitgemaakte zaak.  “Elke kwantitatieve maatstaf toont aan dat wij deze oorlog aan het winnen zijn”, aldus de minister al in1962, nog onder Kennedy. Bij die “kwantitatieve maatstaf”moeten we vooral denken aan de fameuze ‘bodycount”: het met grote regelmaat genoemde getal van zovele tientallen en honderden’Viet-cong-strijders’ en ‘Noord-Vietnamese soldaten’ die waren ‘uitgeschakeld.’

Maar hoe hardnekkig het massamoorden ook werd opgevoerd – met immense bombardementen vanuit de lucht, met steeds herhaalde en uiteraard steeds zeer ’succesvolle’ offensieven – het Vietnamese verzet bleek minstens zo hardnekkig. Dat ging bij Mc Namara -ambitieus en op succes gericht manager die hij was – toch knagen. Hij begon te twijfelen aan de overwinning. Hij begon dat langzaam maar zeker ook naar voren te bregen in de regering – terwijl hij intussen wel stug door ging met de oorlog managen. Uiteindelijk werd president Johnson het gezeur zat, en stuurde hem het Pentagon uit en de Wereldbank in.

De kern van McNamara’s kritiek was niet erg principieel. Hij zag twee dingen.Hij zag uiteindelijk dat de oorlog niet een gevolg v was van ‘Communistische expansiedrang’ of zoiets, maar vannationaal streven naar onafhankelijkheid tegenover eerst Franse, later Amerikaanse, overheersing.Hij zag  aanvankelijk echter vooral dat die oorlog niet te winnen was zonder volslagen genocide toe te passen.

De oorlog berustte dus op een misverstand, en het was geen succesvolle onderneming. En zoals het een manager betaamt: verliesgevende investeringen moet je vroeg of laat schappen, als je een bankroet wil voorkomen. Niet de aantallen doden waren de reden voor zijn kritiek. Niet het inzicht dat de VS helemala niet het récht had om oorlog te voeren in Vietnam, brachten hem ertoe zich tegen de oorlog te keren. Nee, de oorlog was geen succes – kappen dus. Als het verzet in Vietnam in 1966 was ingezakt en de VS had zijn wil aan dat geteisterde land kunnen opleggen, dan was er voor McNamara waarschijnlijk geen probleem geweest. Hij had geen diepe afkeer van oorlogen. Hij had slechts een afkeer van nederlagen. Pas twintig jaar later, toen hij er een kritische terugblik over schreef, bwaser iets van dieper moreel besef en berouw bespeurbaar. Toen noemde hij de oorlog “verkeerd, verschrikkelijk verkeerd”.

 In 1968 werd hij directeur van de Wereldbank. De NY Times schetst zijn werk daar als manager die met goede bedoelingen soms minder goede resultaten boekte. De projecten waar leningen voor beschikbaar waren, leidden nog al eens tot milieuschade en waren lang niet altijd effectief. En armoede bleek hardnekkig: in 1981 waren er volgens de Wereldbank zelf 800 miljoen armen, 200 miljoen meerdan aan het begin van dat decennium.

De NY Times is hier nog te vriendelijk voor zowel de Wereldbank – die er vooral is is om een rond de vrije makrt georganiseerd economisch model ten gunste van grote bedrijven door te drukken – als voor de directeur ervan. Alexander Cockburn geeft wat dit betreft interessante gegevens. Hijvertelt dat de Wereldbank in de jaren van Mc Namara allerlei einge dictaturen van leningen voorzag. Eén ervan was de dictauur van Ceaucescu in Roemenië. Die kreeg 2,36 iljard dollar van 1974 tot 1982- keurig terugbetaald doordat de dictator de Roemeense bevolking effectief uitkneep. Gelukkig bedankte de bevolking de dictator daar in 1989 nog even voor, door  hem in een stevige revolutie omver ter werpen. Maar dat is weer een andere geschiedenis. Hier gaat het me erom te laten zien dat McNamara ook in zijn rol als  wereldbankdirecteur  strijd voerde, niet tegen armoede maar feitelijk tegen de armen. Het was bijna een voortzetting van zijn Vietnamoorlog, maar met andere middelen.

Dat hij ná dit alles wel eens verstandige dingebn wist te eggen – over kernwapens, en ja, ook over de Vietnam-oorlog en zijn aandeel daarin – ik ontken het niet. Dat hij daarmeewerkelijk zijn misdaden heeft goedgemaakt, isechter onzin. Als ik zelfs maar één iemand om help brengen, kom ik ook niet weg met een ‘het was verschrikkelijk verkeerd’, twintig jaar later. Waarom zou dat anders zijn als je hebt geholpen 3,2 miljoen mensen – het cijfer dat McNamara zelf hanteerde – om te brengen in Vietnam?

1.  “Demolition access to the WTC Towers

On occasion, the public has been asked by George W. Bush to refrain from considering certain conspiracy theories. Bush has made such requests when people were looking into crimes in which he might be culpable. For example, when in 1994 Bush’s former company Harken Energy was linked to the fraudulent Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) through several investors, Bush’s spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, shut down the inquiry by telling the Associated Press — “We have no response to silly conspiracy theories.” On another occasion, Bush said in a televised speech — “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th.”

But paradoxically, we have also been asked to believe Bush’s own outrageous conspiracy theory about 9/11, one that has proven to be false in many ways. One important way to see the false nature of Bush’s conspiracy theory is to note the fact that the World Trade Center buildings could only have fallen as they did through the use of explosives. A number of independent scientific studies have pointed out this fact ^{[1, 2, 3, 4]}, but it was Bush’s own scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), through their inability to provide a convincing defense of the official line, who ultimately proved that explosives were necessary.
…
While examining the tenants in each critical area, we should ask – Cui Bono? That is, who benefited from the destruction of the WTC buildings, and the resulting War on Terror? The obvious answer includes, primarily, the Bush Administration and its friends. It also includes overlapping groups of oil and gas companies, defense contractors, and those who desired to wield undue influence on international policies related to a wide number of issues from civil rights to space domination.
…

Add to this L. Paul Bremer, and the possible Marsh ties to demolition technology become clearer. One month after 9/11, Bremer would become the CEO for a new division called Marsh Crisis. Interestingly, the Yale graduate Bremer had been working to complete the National Report on Terrorism, and prior to that had been managing director for Kissinger Associates. According to a US Senate report, Kissinger Associates had a number of meetings with BCCI representatives in the late eighties and early nineties, and it refused to provide documents requested by the Senate investigators.^[17] Bremer was also a member of the board for Akzo Nobel, the parent of International Paint, a company that produced a fireproofing application for skyscrapers called Interchar.^[24]

Bremer was on the international advisory board for the Japanese mining and machinery company, Komatsu. At the time, Komatsu had been involved in a joint venture agreement with Dresser Industries, the oil-services/intelligence front in which Prescott Bush Sr. and George H. W. Bush got their start with Neil Mallon. The Komatsu-Dresser mining division operated from 1988 to 1997. In July 1996, it patented a thermite demolition device that could “demolish a concrete structure at a high efficiency, while preventing a secondary problem due to noise, flying dust and chips, and the like.”^[25] Residues of thermite, the highly energetic chemical mixture, have been confirmed in samples of the WTC dust, and the use of thermite at the WTC was also revealed by environmental data.^{[1, 2, 3, 4, 26]} Dresser Industries merged with Dick Cheney’s Halliburton in 1998.

It is less well known that Bremer’s relationship to Marsh started earlier. In fact, on 9/11, Bremer was the CEO of Marsh Political Risk Practice and he had an office in the south tower. That day, he was interviewed on NBC television, stating that Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.^[27]

Bremer was called away from Marsh in 2003, to be the Iraq Occupation Governor. His work in that role has been widely criticized.
…

If we look at the companies that occupied the impact zones of the WTC towers, and other floors that might have played a useful role in the demolition of the towers, we see connections to organizations that had access to explosive materials, and to the expertise required to use explosives. Mining companies like Washington, Morrison-Knudsen, Komatsu and Aoki Construction (and John Lehman’s Special Devices Inc.) have access to many types of explosive materials. Oil and gas companies, like those associated with Exco, use explosives for exploration. Some of the explosive technologies available to these companies, for example Komatsu and Washington, involve thermite, a chemical mixture that has been identified in the WTC dust and in the environmental data at Ground Zero.

It seems that, if certain management representatives of the tenant companies listed above wanted to help bring the WTC towers down, they would have been well suited to do so. The companies mentioned were located at well-spaced intervals in the buildings, and some, for example Marsh and the Primark subsidiaries, had a reputation of being secretive. In fact, a number of the executives from these firms were either on the board of intelligence firms (e.g. In-Q-Tel, TASC), or were closely related to others who were. Others were connected to the CIA itself, and to some of the largest defense contractors in the world, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Halliburton, and SAIC.

There are also strong connections to those who benefited from the 9/11 attacks, most notably the Bush family and their corporate network, including Dresser Industries (now Halliburton) and UBS, and to Deutsche Bank and it subsidiaries, reported to have brokered the insider trading deals. There are links between these tenant companies and the terrorist-related fraudulent bank BCCI.

…

In the end, we might see that conspiracies are not just limited to the powerless people who happen to live on the most strategically important lands in the world. The conspiracies that matter might involve the powerful people who seek access to those lands, and who have spent their lives seeking more power.”

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0907/S00124.htm

2.  “Why Is a Leading Feminist Organization Lending Its Name to Support Escalation in Afghanistan?

As humanitarians and as feminists, it is the welfare of the civilian population in Afghanistan that concerns us most deeply. That is why it was so discouraging to learn that the Feminist Majority Foundation has lent its good name — and the good name of feminism in general — to advocate for further troop escalation and war.

On its foundation Web site, the first stated objective of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s “Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls” is to “expand peacekeeping forces.”

First of all, coalition troops are combat forces and are there to fight a war, not to preserve peace. Not even the Pentagon uses that language to describe U.S. forces there. More importantly, the tired claim that one of the chief objectives of the military occupation of Afghanistan is to liberate Afghan women is not only absurd, it is offensive.

Waging war does not lead to the liberation of women anywhere. Women always disproportionately suffer the effects of war, and to think that women’s rights can be won with bullets and bloodshed is a position dangerous in its naïveté. The Feminist Majority should know this instinctively.

…

The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is doing nothing to protect Afghan women. The level of self-immolation among women was never as high as it is now. When there is no justice for women, they find no other way out but suicide.

Feminists and other humanitarians should learn from history. This isn’t the first time the welfare of women has been trotted out as a pretext for imperialist military aggression.

Columbia Professor Lila Abu-Lughod, a woman of Palestinian descent, writes: “We need to be suspicious when neat cultural icons are plastered over messier historical and political narratives; so we need to be wary when Lord Cromer in British-ruled Egypt, French ladies in Algeria, and Laura Bush, all with military troops behind them, claim to be saving or liberating Muslim women.”

Feminists around the world must refuse to allow the good name of feminism to be manipulated to provide political cover for yet another war of aggression.

The Feminist Majority Foundation would do well to heed the demand of dissident Member of Parliament Malalai Joya, representing Farah province, who was kicked out of the parliament last year for courageously speaking out. Addressing a press conference in the wake of the U.S. bombing of her province she was clear: “We ask for an end to the occupation of Afghanistan and a stop to such tragic war crimes.”

That should be the first action item for the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls.”

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/141165

3.  “McNamara’s Other Debacle

Beginning in 1976, the Bank poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a scheme by the government of Indonesia to remove — sometimes forcibly — several million people from the densely populated island of Java and resettle them on comparatively barren islands. One Australian critic noted that transmigration was largely “the Javanese version of Nazi Germany’s lebensraum.”

McNamara’s profusion of aid allowed politicians in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere to seize far more power over farmers, businessmen, factory owners, and other productive individuals. The result was a profusion of state monopolies that helped destroy hope for entire generations.

As Counterpunch editor and author Alexander Cockburn observed, “The managerial ideal for McNamara was managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged to Pinochet’s Chile after Allende’s overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina, to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after the ‘65 coup in Indonesia, and to the Romania of Ceausescu.”

As long as McNamara could continue boosting the raw amounts of World Bank loans, he could continue pretending that he was saving the world. McNamara bankrolled socialist governments based on the same type of phony statistics that he used to justify expanding the U.S. war in Vietnam. He could strut like a vanquisher of either communism or world poverty as long as he embraced statistical hooey.

Even after laying wreckage to much of the globe, Robert McNamara was still treated by much of the mainstream media as the “best and the brightest.” (The Washington Post appointed him to its board of directors). Citizens should be wary of those who would place halos over humanity’s brutal oppressors.”

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0907b.asp

5.  “TSA: Tyrannical, Silly Agency

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=132

6.  “Does the PASS ID Act Protect Privacy?

Does PASS ID address “most of the major privacy and security concerns with REAL ID”? Not even close. PASS ID is a national ID, with all the privacy consequences that go with that.

Changing the name of REAL ID to something else is not an alternative to scrapping it. Scrapping REAL ID is something Senator Akaka (D-HI) proposed in the last Congress. Fixing REAL ID is an impossibility, and PASS ID does not do that.”

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/07/07/does-the-pass-id-act-protect-privacy/

7.  Afghanistan:

“It is bad news that President Hamid Karzai has brought the old Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam back into government, especially since he was implicated in a massacre of Taliban prisoners of war in 2001. Note that Karzai is bringing back another warlord with a lot of blood on his hands, Muhammad Fahim, as his vice president. Karzai, in fact, appears to want to turn his government into warlord central. What does that say about Karzai?”

http://www.juancole.com/

8.  “Swine Flu Kills People Whose Bodies Are Highly Stressed

The World Health Organization states:

The majority of those who died were pregnant, had asthma, diabetes or other chronic diseases…

Moreover, extremely obese people are susceptible. As Bloomberg writes:

Scientists don’t yet know whether extremely overweight people get sicker because of associated conditions like heart disease and asthma, or whether the excess fat itself makes them more vulnerable.

The common thread in all of these conditions appears to me to be that swine flu killed people whose bodies were stressed - either by illness, extreme obesity or pregnancy. Pregnancy is a wonderful thing, but it is stressful to the mother’s body.”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/swine-flu-kills-people-whose-bodies-are.html

9.  “The Fed’s “Independence” Argument is False

The Fed’s main argument against an audit by Congress is that it would interfere with the Fed’s “independence”.

For example, in his Congressional testimony yesterday – entitled “Federal Reserve independence” – the vice chair of the Fed used the “i” word 30 times.

What Does Fed Independence Mean?

The Fed is pretending that it is merely trying to insulate itself from political pressure, and that politician’s re-election concerns should not interfere with sound “monetary policy”.

That sounds good, doesn’t it?

But it is a red herring

Congress is elected by the people, and the people can throw the bums out if they don’t listen to the people’s demands. So even though most congress members are political hacks, they are subject to at least some accountability.

The Fed, on the other hand, is subject to no accountability. The Fed is refusing to provide Congress any information on where the trillions of dollars it has handed out have gone. The Fed is also refusing to disclose what toxic assets it has taken from the banks and put om its own books.

And there are a few congress people who actually have the best people’s interests in mind, and want to hold the Fed accountable – on behalf of the people.

What the Fed is really arguing is that it should not have to answer to the American people.

Because if the American people knew what the Fed was really doing, they would demand that it be terminated immediately.”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/feds-independence-argument-is-false.html

10.  “Honduras: US-backed mediation legitimizes military coup

The talks convened in the Costa Rican capital San José on Thursday with the purported aim of resolving the political crisis unleashed by the June 28 coup in neighboring Honduras, are shaping up as a farce. The apparent object of this fraudulent exercise is to legitimize the military overthrow of the elected president of Honduras and realize the aims of Washington and the predominant sections of the right-wing Honduran oligarchy.”

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14320

11.  “That about sums everything up:  War Crimes are heinous and intolerable acts that all decent people reject; “anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated”; and War Criminals must not be allowed in any positions of authority . . . . except when the War Crimes in question are committed by Americans, in which case all investigations and accountability must be blocked and those who defended and even approved them are perfectly welcomed in our highest positions of authority (including, ironically, overseeing our war in Afghanistan).  See also, quite relatedly:  this post from earlier today on how we continue to shield from any accountability the clear and serious crimes committed by Bush officials in how they spied on Americans.  Let’s just repeat the sermon from the anonymous Obama official in demanding an investigation into crimes by this Afghan warlord:  “We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.“  It doesn’t appear that they know what the word “anyone” means.

UPDATE:  Obama today is in Ghana and, according to CBS News‘ Mark Knoller, he vowed that the U.S. would help Africa “hold war criminals accountable” — meaning, of course, African war criminals.  Obviously, the magnitude of war crimes can vary, but given the huge impact (including many detainee deaths) which Bush war crimes wreaked, no reasonable person can argue that accountability is inappropriate there because they aren’t significant enough.  Rather obviously, the only attribute that causes us to shield them from exposure and accountability is that they are American.”

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

“McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. Whatever else distinguishes JFK’s New Frontier or LBJ’s Great Society from Barack Obama’s “New Foundation,” this too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems — the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate. These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase “the best and the brightest” has been scrubbed of its intended irony.”

Wall Street Journal clarity.

1.  “A war of colonial conquest in Afghanistan

The ostensible legal basis on which American troops are in Afghanistan is the “Authorization for Use of Military Force”, the joint resolution passed by the US Congress on September 18, 2001—one week after 9/11. The resolution authorised military force for the purpose of capturing or destroying the Al Qaeda leadership, beginning with bin Laden, so as to prevent further terrorist attacks.

Nearly eight years later, there is barely the pretence that American troops are in Afghanistan to hunt down Al Qaeda. Instead, the war is declared to be against the “Taliban”—a label indiscriminately applied to any Afghan who resists the US-led occupation. At no time, however, was there an accusation that the Taliban had a role in 9/11. The Bush administration’s justification for targeting the Islamist government in Kabul was that it rejected an ultimatum to turn over the Al Qaeda leadership to the United States.

The dropping of the original pretext for the invasion poses the question: with what purported legal justification has the US government and its allies continued and escalated the war? The truth is they have none. Nothing remains but the reality of an imperialist war of plunder and domination.

The US-led occupation of Afghanistan and the terrible violence engulfing Pakistan is the culmination of 30 years of American imperialist intrigue in Central Asia to establish strategic and economic dominance over the resource-rich region.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j10.shtml

2.  “The FBI informant and the Bronx bomb plot

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly held press conferences at the synagogues to reassure New Yorkers about their safety. During Kelly’s remarks, it was startling to hear the commissioner refer to al-Qaeda by name, if only to say that the four purported home-grown terrorists had no ties to Osama Bin Laden’s organization.

As more details emerged, however, the less the four defendants sounded like men with the skills to plan a sophisticated terror plot. They were small-time crooks, felons with long criminal records whose previous activities revolved around smoking marijuana and playing video games. One defendant, Laguerre Payen, was arrested in a crack house surrounded by bottles of his own urine; his lawyer describes him as “mildly retarded.”

It seemed fairly astounding that, for a full calendar year, such a group could remain interested in and plan anything more complex than a backyard barbecue, let alone a multipronged paramilitary assault, as the indictment against them alleged.

But what the indictment didn’t say, and what the initial news reports didn’t fill in, was the extent to which the fifth man in the plot, an unnamed FBI informant, had provided the glue to hold the Newburgh 4 together.
…
There have been no real domestic “terrorism” cases that have not been instigated by an FBI informant. What amazes me is that the writers of the Voice article don’t draw the logical conclusion that all of the so-called terrorism cases over the past 20 years have been sting type affairs, in which the FBI was heavily involved. The real question, of course, is why Moslems have been targeted..”

http://www.911blogger.com/node/20600

3.  “McNamaranism Alive and Well
Why Robert McNamara lived to age 93 is not for us to know. He did have second thoughts, but his decades-late utterances about the Pentagon and Washington’s lies and immorality only enraged those who hated the war, as well as those who believed in the empire.

But to mourn his passing is unnecessary. We haven’t learned a thing from his life and crimes. We continue to trust our overseas wars and our patriotic souls to soft-handed, finely dressed, wire-rimmed statist intellectuals and pansy-hearted politicians, beholden to the lobbies of democracy, of national industry, of foreign interests, of empire.

We trust them and we send our own unemployable and ill-educated children into the maw, for their own good. To make them strong and pure. To instill in them blind obedience to intellectuals in suits. To train them in the ways of professional and political bean counters who cannot count.

Until we the people completely turn our backs on the state, and its beloved empire, we are all McNamarans.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski233.html

4.  “Reporting on Iran by the numbers

Imagine the mayor of your city or town calls a live press conference to announce a costly program to exterminate all the sewer crocodiles that live in the cities sewer system as per that old urban legend.  With budgets running very tight in this tough economy, with vital services being drastically cut back all throughout city government, the Mayor announces that he is setting aside several million dollars to exterminate crocodiles in the city sewer system that don’t exist and never have.

Now imagine, that instead of running a headline the next day like “Unbalanced Mayor calls for war on crocs that don’t exist” the most trusted city newspaper of record runs one that reads “Mayor calls for war on sewer crocs” and not once in the whole story is it even hinted that this Mayor’s claims are baseless, absurd, and not to mention insane.

That, almost without exaggeration, describes nearly all reporting on Iran and the “nuclear” issue in the United States.  Our Federal government makes not only wholly unsubstantiated claims about Iran’s nuclear program but ones that are contradicted by ample available evidence (even some of it coming from the federal government itself!) and our press repeats these claims with nary a challenge as to their veracity.

Just about every single newspaper wire story on Iran and the nuclear issue is a veritable garden of lies of omission, purposeful misrepresentations, and unsubstantiated allegations ripe to be impeached but left unchallenged in any meaningful way.  These stories are so far removed from any sort of minimal journalistic ethics or standards that they may as well be written by the Pentagon.”

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-3665-Boston-Libertarian-Examiner~y2009m7d8-Reporting-on-Iran-by-the-numbers

5.  “Barack McNamara Obama

Why Can’t Obama See His Wars Are Unwinnable?

“We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes,” McNamara warned long after the fact, speaking of “America’s enemies” but really just about people–people who live in other countries. People whose countries possess reserves of natural gas (Vietnam) or oil (Iraq) or are situated between energy reserves and deep-sea ports where oil tankers dock (Afghanistan and Pakistan).

Why can’t President Obama imagine himself living in a poor village in Pakistan? Why can’t he feel the anger and contempt felt by Pakistanis who hear pilotless drone planes buzzing overhead, firing missiles willy-nilly at civilians and guerilla fighters alike, dispatched by a distant enemy too cowardly to put live soldiers and pilots in harm’s way?

“We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo–men, women and children,” McNamara said. “LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He–and I’d say I–were behaving as war criminals.” 900,000 Japanese civilians died in all.

“Make no mistake, the international community is not winning in Afghanistan,” concluded the Atlantic Council in 2008. Things have only gotten worse as U.S. troop presence has increased: more violence, more drugs, less reconstruction.

Like McNamara, Obama doesn’t understand a basic truth: you can’t successfully manage an inherently doomed premise. Colonialism is dead. Occupiers will never enjoy peace. Neither the Afghans nor the Iraqis nor the Pakistanis will rest until we withdraw our forces. The only success we will find is in accepting defeat sooner rather than later.”

http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/?uc_full_date=20090707