> The thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a general consensus --
> shared by pwogs like Rothschild, commenters at Lenin's Tomb, and neocons
> like Kagan -- that the Georgia-Russia war means the geopolitics and
> resource-wars are back.
What it means is that we are potentially in serious fucking trouble.
If we're going to have big wars over resources, we might as well turn out the lights on society right now.
I know who is going to win those wars, should they happen. I am a native and citizen of that country, and these are wars I really, really do NOT want to "win".
You think the United States of America won't "win" that contest? Are you crazy?
Leaving aside for the moment total dominance in military hardware, the U.S. has always tried to fight wars really without even getting our allies on our side. But look at the Sunni model in Iraq. Thanks to animals like Kagan, we're finally learning to compromise our interests just a little more intelligently and get people willingly fighting for us.
All the U.S. needs to do is learn what essentially every other Empire in history has known - what Putin clearly knows - and that is how to get local armies on our side - how to manipulate partisanships and political cross-currents to get more men and guns willingly pointing their weapons against what become common enemies.
Hell, the Nazis even knew how to do it and they openly called everyone else in the world inferior animals - not the best diplomats were the Nazis. The British STILL have foreign regiments - as do the French, for Pete's sake.
Even before the Sunni thing, we had hired ourself an army of "contractor" mercenaries bigger than most countries' - and we didn't even try to hire on the cheap. How many Africans could we get? Indians? Indonesians? How many Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Czechs, Romanians? Mexicans? We could probably field a hundred-thousand man army comprised only of military-trained Mexican nationals currently living in the United States.
If anybody thinks he wants to see resource wars, I would bid him think again.
On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 11:32 AM, Eric <rayrena at realtime.net> wrote:
>> Thanks, good stuff.
>>
>> Very reasonable.
>
> I suppose, if reasonableness is your thing. Sometimes evenhandedness means
> not saying anything, though.
>
>> > We don't need a new Cold War with Russia, which still has a couple of
>> > thousand nuclear weapons that can hit our shores in 15 minutes.
>
> The thing I've noticed is that there seems to be a general consensus --
> shared by pwogs like Rothschild, commenters at Lenin's Tomb, and neocons
> like Kagan -- that the Georgia-Russia war means the geopolitics and
> resource-wars are back. Accepting for the moment that they were ever gone,
> this realization of this fact seems to come with relief. Now everyone can
> return to quoting Lenin and Chomsky and talk about world politics as if it
> were all a question of analyzing the relations between states, especially
> the two major poles, and figuring out where the clients play into it. The
> cold war's back, and it feels good.
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