You got a love/live it.
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary14.html
I liked his last book, but you got to wonder too about the blind spots.
Our presence in Iraq due to Bush's war likened to a "police station"? Obviously in a pretty dangerous neighborhood. But exactly why is it so dangerous? For us?
Asking too many questions again, at least for Kunstler.
Personally I think the metaphor "pirates' den" works better, or at least gives a better picture of how the Iraqis see us.
So with the word out about all that lost oil money, and the torture, and the brutal occupation, the fixed intel for the illegal war, the fixed vote for the sham elections, and the targetting of whole populations and laying waste to cities. . . not to mention screwing our own troops or the incompetence in failing to get anything running.
I smell something really bad when I read stuff that doesn't address that obvious reality.
How easily too he accepts his reality of more attacks in Europe, due most likely to their persistant fecklessness. . . unlike our own American military can doism. . . or something like that.
Instead of opposition, "support the troops" which inevitably means support Bush's war. Oh and remember always how powerful we are!
Never the opposite, that our military is in fact very brittle and about to snap. Moral is to the physical three to one as Napoleon said. I saw that with the Western Group of Forces in Germany in the late 1980's. It doesn't take that much really for a modern army's high tempo equipment to be reduced to simple junk in the period of a year or less. All the troops have to do is stop serving and maintaining their equipment properly, stop getting spare parts, start cannibalization of equipment, still having to use it of course. More direct things as well such as stop feeding the troops properly. Mess around with their pay.
Contrary to Kunstler, none of this is predetermined. There need be no more big attacks in Europe or rather perhaps the trend can be reversed. One has to consider how the situation has changed over the last four years and why. I think that Kunstler knows more than he lets on since he brought up the question of former Soviet central Asia as well. Yes, the end of the global war on terror will be the end of those bases as the Uzbeks and others have indicated. All that natural gas in Turkmanistan.
What Kunstler fails to understand imo is that Bush has already blown it. The wager made, the dice rolled, the operation hopelessly botched. We're in the backwash now. . . our military power doesn't help us on this one since the strategic direction has already lost the hope of inplementing their radical agenda. We don't have the power, let alone the commitment to carry out Bush's ambitions. The feeling among our handlers is the war is a continuation of economics by other means. Battle requires bombs and bombs cost lots of money. Battle leads to victory and victory in battle requires only an accurate target set. Since we can destroy anything we can target in their minds it's easy. But how does one change whole cultures? What exactly does one target? How does one rob and then play it as a sort of liberation and make the victims believe it? It's not selling, but don't tell the American people that.
We might be able to drag this out for a decade, heaven forbid, but whatever we do from this point on we lose - the longer this draws out the worse it will be.