And a mind is a terrible thing to lose.
Speaking of losing one's mind, it's curious to note that old Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski putting Rice on the hotseat for along with James Baker and Company. Thus the old guard gets its digs in for being left out of the party.
Jeff Wells takes a moment to take a dig at the usual business of the Washington cabal known as the U. S. Senate:
...Last week, while excoriating Bush's Iraq policy before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he warned
of "a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran." He sees the scenario unfolding with
"Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a 'defensive' [his own quotation marks] US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan."
On leaving the hearing, Brzezinski was pointedly asked by reporter Barry Grey whether he was "suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself." He responded that he had "no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous." Grey followed up, "Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?" To which Brzezinski replied, "I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace."
This is the same Brzezinski, of course, who rhetorically asked, of his early sponsorship of Islamic radicals as US proxies, "What was more important in the world view of history? The possible creation of an armed, radical Islamic movement, or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few fired-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?" (And note, Brzezinski's policy of instigation was launched in Afghanistan against it's pro-Soviet government in order to goad the USSR into its bloody quagmire.) His book The Grand Chessboard (published, I realize with a slight frisson of synchronicity, the same year as Corso's), was cited early in the days following 9/11 as America's road-map of geopolitical ambition in the 21st Century. He knows better than most the reach of the hidden hand. Now, he's dropping broad hints that the US may manufacture a provocation in Iraq, blame it upon Iran and catastrophically broaden the war. So what do we do when they begin to sound like us?
On the one hand we should always be cautious about blithely accepting the word of deep-power embeds, but I also think it helps our understanding along if we admit that their world is neither static nor monolithic. It may appear from a distance that they're all in it together - and at our distance the differences between factions of the global elite may be too nuanced and rarefied to hold much meaning for us - but I believe there's a dynamism among conspirators that often seems lost on their theorists, some of whom like to project a virtual hive-mind upon the powerful. Rather than an undifferentiated block of them, I imagine an inter-penetrating Venn diagram of rival interests, means and analyses, and while Brzezinski is certainly in the thick of it that doesn't mean his opposition to the White House's adventurism is a sham intended only for public consumption. Though his reasons are certainly not the same as mine. (Brzezinski, interested in the efficient projection of American power, can foresee its ruin by the Cheney/Bush model, but he seems to regard it as the accident of bad policy rather than an intentional controlled collapse...)
An "accident of bad policy" is the logical reason behind it all, and on one level, the simplest explanation that Occam's Razor produces. Mr. Brzezinski can't be faulted for taking that tack to the wind. But blaming simple bad policy decisions is something of a non sequitur when quite a few of the policy makers are making quite a bit of money off of it. It's not so bad at all for Bu$h's ba$e.
Chaos is the plan. There's no accident involved with making big money. That's the razor that slices the problem to the bone.
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