Author: Sam Koritz

They Marched into Sunlight is worth reading, especially for people like me who are interested in the Vietnam War but too young to remember it. Maraniss tells two main stories, based on interviews: an ambush of US soldiers in Vietnam and an antiwar demonstration gone wrong on the U. of Wisconsin campus, both of which occurred in October 1967. Maraniss expresses an affectionate acceptance of his (non-fictional) characters that reminded me of War and Peace, and made it unusually easy to identify with most of them. The two mains stories are, as Walter Isaacson’s jacket blurb notes, “set against the backdrop of the helpless agony that is engulfing the White House of Lyndon Johnson.” Unlike some other readers, though, I can’t say that my empathy extended to Lyndon Johnson. I kept thinking, pull the troops out if you’re so upset.

While I was reading They Marched I went to see The Fog of War, the documentary film about Vietnam-era defense secretary Robert McNamara. The movie was interesting but kind of creepy and unpleasant, with McNamara spinning his life story and, it seemed, trying to make himself appear wise, erudite and philosophical. At one point he recounts traveling to Vietnam in the early ’90s and meeting with one of the former leaders of the Communist forces. A heated debate ensues about cause of the war: the Vietnamese leader claims that his side fought for independence against imperialist foreigners, and McNamara claims that US war leaders fought to keep Vietnam free from the rule of a Soviet and Chinese puppet government. The Vietnamese replies something like “you must never have opened a history book, since Vietnam fought China for centuries.” The audience laughs.

My Former Sec of Defense Went to Cuba and All I Got Was This Lousy Near-Apocalypse

McNamara describes going to Cuba for a Cuban Missile Crisis villain reunion. Sure enough, the incompetents almost ended civilization in a nuclear war in the early ’60s. I’m gonna go out on a limb here & opine that the wooly-headed liberals are right on this one: the citizens of all 9 axis-of-apocalypse countries should get organized and insist that “their” governments destroy those useless inherently terrorist weapons. And let’s do it quickly before we’re too far along in the post-post-Cold War era, and the loonies think up a new excuse to keep them.

As I mentioned previously (“Sold Short), while the US government was busy ignoring prominent Saudi terrorists in California (& what’s the deal with this Saudi government-funded San Diego-based bigamist /alleged terror financier with a penchant for international travel?) and promoting jihad in the Balkans, Antiwar.com was providing (absolutely free) warnings of the domestic terrorist threat. While the SEC was busy chasing a Jersey teen short-seller Manuel Asensio was uncovering deception in the markets and posting the info (absolutely free) on his website. Here’s another one: while the US military was invading Iraq to stop an invisible wmd program, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (May 2003 issue) warned the world of a real program by re-publishing Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan’s centrifuge sales brochure. This is the same Khan that President Bush shielded from US intelligence, according to a BBC report: “CIA and other agents told BBC they could not investigate the spread of ‘Islamic Bombs’ through Pakistan because funding appeared to originate in Saudi Arabia.”

(The Pakistan proliferation double-standard is another example of the Axis of Allies phenomenon I’ve commented on before, though perhaps Axis of Bait-and-Switch would be more accurate. According to a UPI survey, the vast majority of the terror suspects being illegally held by the US military in Cuba are citizens of nations allied with the United States. 160 of them are Saudis and 82 of them are Pakistanis, while only a single prisoner is an Iraqi, and there are no Iranians or North Koreans.)

Of course there’s no such thing as a free scoop, which is why Antiwar.com has periodic pledge weeks and can always use a contribution. Here’s another good reason to give: it might make you happier. According to a recently-published book, You Don’t Have to be Rich, giving to charity is one of the five habits statistically linked to feelings of financial satisfaction. And while we’re on the subject, a good book about personal finance for hard-working high-earners is Your Money or Your Life.

For self-directed stock market investors, The Battle for Investment Survival is a fun read by a veteran trader, Gerald M. Loeb. It was originally published in 1935, and has that era’s fear of risk. Loeb advises that we try to view our stocks as if we don’t own them; any that we wouldn’t buy, we should sell. This is meant to overcome the “endowment effect,” a term (from the “new science” of behavioral economics) that describes the quirk of human nature in which we value something that we already own more than we would value the same thing if we didn’t own it.

Back in 2000, Justin Raimondo wrote an article called “An Electronic Pearl Harbor?” about curious Kosovo war-related hacker attacks and the role of Network Solutions, the then-monopolist of Internet domain names. Interested readers can revisit this story in Sold Short: Uncovering Deception in the Markets by famed short-seller Manuel Asensio.

Short-sellers are, essentially, people who bet that certain stocks will fall. It’s risky business; a stock can rise more than it can fall so gains are limited but losses are theoretically unlimited. And as the old trader ditty says: “He who sells what isn’t his’n, must buy it back or go to prison.” Short-sellers have a bad reputation but during the height of the millennial excesses, while the Feds were chasing a New Jersey high school student, Asensio was uncovering deception in the markets and posting the information for free on his website (much like Antiwar.com posted warnings about the domestic terrorist threat while the government was busy aiding jihad in the Balkans).

Asensio’s book primarily chronicles his successes, but in a chapter called Abusing the Process, in a section called “Fiends [sic] in High Places: Network Solutions,” he details a notable failure:

“Network Solutions (Nasdaq: NSOL) achieved its fortune on the basis of a government affirmative action contract that was snatched up by a huge, money-laden defense contractor. The contractor then leveraged this prize many times over by working the political system, applying a political headlock at the highest levels of the federal government. …

“In March 1995 McHenry and his partners sold Network Solutions for $48 million to Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a huge, privately owned, astonishingly well-connected defense contractor based in San Diego.

“SAIC has about $4 billion in annual revenues, roughly 80 percent of which are derived from federal contracts. SAIC board members include Retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who was offered the job of defense secretary by Bill Clinton, and two retired generals, from the army and the air force. Past board members have included former Defense Secretary William Perry; Melvin Laird, Nixon’s defense secretary; Donald Hicks, former head of research and development for the Pentagon; and former CIA directors Robert Gates and John Deutsch. The firm and its executives contribute over $100,000 to political campaigns in each election cycle. …

“All of the facts indicated to us that NSOL should not have been successful in retaining the interests that if did in the domain-name registry. The amount of money it was allowed to change for its registry service is offensive. The terms were imposed on the market through the influence that Network Solutions has with the federal government. That’s what makes this case completely different from any other company we’ve publicly shorted.

“When you’re dealing with the president of the United States and the secretary of commerce, you’re beyond the law and beyond logic. These people create the rules. We bet … on free market forces. There was a lot of money involved here – and a lot of companies that could do the job. We believed that potential competitors in both the registry and registrar services were going to balance out Network Solutions’ political power. But SAIC’s influence in the federal government was greater than the force of the free enterprise system, stronger than those competitors that were willing and able to provide better services at far lower cost than Network Solutions. Who would have thought it? Not I – not at the time, anyway.”

More:

Buy Sold Short: Uncovering Deception in the Markets (and help Antiwar.com)!

Read “Network Solutions: By Any Other Name, a Monopoly.com,” by Debra Sparks.

Read “An Electronic Pearl Harbor?” by Justin Raimondo.

Read “Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis – and 15,” by Michael Lewis.

Visit Asensio.com.

Read “American Interventionism and the Terrorist Threat,” by Jon Basil Utley.

Read “Washington Behind Terrorist Attacks in Macedonia,” by Michel Chossudovsky.

Got a number of emails re “Why There’s No Left Left (Part II).”

Eugene Koontz pointed out that 2 of the links in the post were broken. Here they are again: “Why There’s No Left Left [Part I]” and “Cash or Charge?”

Thanks Mr. Koontz!

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Thant Tessman writes:

“Minor note: The article about government debt linked to in the blog entry [“Tuition warfare“] says: ‘The government can spend more money than it takes in because it has the power to borrow money on the open market.’ This is not the whole story. The government would not be able to borrow the kind of money it does to finance the wars we’ve seen throughout U.S. history without the banks (through the mechanisms of the Federal Reserve and fractional-reserve banking) effectively printing money to buy that government debt. I’m sure this is something most of the contributors to Antiwar.com already know. I only mention it because this point never seems to get the attention it deserves.”

—

B. Sirius writes:

“Let’s see, if we were citizens of a foreign country, Brazil for example, they would just forgive the national debt. When you have a population as collectively dumb as we are, folks just bend over and grab their ankles.”

—

And Cam Hardy writes:

“I’m a regular reader of Antiwar.com, and generally your Mad Max-style libertarianism doesn’t get in the way of quality reporting and commentary. However, the blog entry ‘Why There’s No Left Left Part II’ was ridiculous. If there truly was ‘no Left left,’ the antiwar movement would be an irrelevant bunch of pseudo-intellects blogging about the need for roads to be privatized.”

Good eye for exaggeration, M. Hardy! “Why There’s Little Left Left” would have been more accurate. Also, Nixon did win in a landslide a few decades ago so maybe “Why There’s So Little Left” would have been better yet.

And why the wishy-washy Kerry isn’t likely to win.

Read an excerpt of Myths of Rich and Poor.”

Or buy the book (and help out Antiwar.com)!

Read “Why There’s No Left Left” Part I.

To which a reader replies suggesting that the rise in the US standard of living is due to personal debt: “Cash or Charge?.”

But more ominous than personal debt is the government’s debt, which some analysts claim is approaching $100,000 per American (not per taxpayer, per man, woman and child) if Social Security obligations are included. How is a nation of people living paycheck to paycheck gonna pay down $100K per person? Not to worry, the same birdbrains and thieves who brought us the expensive, dangerous and (some of us would say) unethical everything-but-neutrality, fund’em-then-bomb’em foreign policy are hard at work, uh…

As weird as it seems in the current everybody-hates-us environment, back in the ‘90s political pundits argued that the US’s popularity demonstrated an American exception to balance of power theory. See, according to standard geopolitical theory nations should ally themselves in such a way as to thwart the most powerful interventionist state. Like the law of reversion to the mean, the balance of power tendency increases in strength as geopolitical power increases, making enemies of allies and causing empires to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. A classic example is the British army in North America, they defeated the French and Indians for (and with) their colonists, but having defeated their enemy, their ally, the colonists, no longer threatened, rebelled.

Other than to the minority of us who were alarmed (disgusted?, horrified?) by the Bush Doctrine precursor, the Kosovo intervention, the US’s growing power in the ‘90s seemed to give the USA a get-out-of-history-free card. Post-9/11 was a perfect time to reconsider: here’s an attack allegedly masterminded by an organization that was created during a US-backed victory in Afghanistan. Later, when Iraq “threatened” Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda offered to defend Saudi Arabia, but was rebuffed, since the US was already on duty. Who would have won if Saddam and al Qaeda fought? Who cares? According to a Cato Institute study, Iraq could have taken over Saudi Arabia and raised oil prices, and still it would have been cheaper than the Gulf War. Throw in the 9/11 attack, the second Gulf war, and (if we’re to believe McVeigh), maybe, the OC bombing and it’s a no-brainer: Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne rephrased the obvious, if counter-instinctual, foreign policy implied by the law of the balance of power and called their suggested policy “offshore balancing.”

Back in the ‘80s, as most AWC readers know, the US government spent billions of dollars quasi-covertly funding international jihad in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and Yemen, respectively, provided the most and second-most foot soldiers. Saudi Arabia also provided US matching funds, and Pakistani intelligence (later creators of the Taliban) directed the training programs.

Last week UPI (“Revealed: the nationalities of Guantanamo”) released the “tentatively determined … nationalities” of 95% of the terror-war prisoners that the Pentagon is holding in Cuba. Most of the 619 alleged anti-American terrorists were seized in Afghanistan, but some were captured among the US’s Muslim allies in Bosnia, and elsewhere. 38 nationalities are represented. Interestingly, only 80 – or 13% – of the prisoners are Afghans. The top three nationalities represented – Saudis, Yemenis, and Pakistanis, in that order – exactly match the degree of involvement of those nations as US allies in the Afghan jihad. Of the 539 non-Afghans, 160 – or 30% – are Saudis, 85 are Yemenis, and 82 are Pakistanis. Those 3 groups make up more than half of the non-Afghan total, with citizens of other US allies comprising most of the rest. Meanwhile, President Bush’s “axis of evil” is represented by a single Iraqi.

Strange but true:

– Citizens of the US’s Afghan jihad allies make up over 300 times as many of the suspected anti-American terrorists than do citizens of the “axis” nations.

– There are as many white Australians and Bahraini royals in the Cuba clink as there are citizens of all of the “axis” nations combined.

– There are twelve times as many citizens of the freedom-loving US ally Kuwait locked up as there are Iraqis, Iranians and Koreans combined.

The “Defense” Dept. actually endangers the United States — for example, its empire of bases brought a foreign power struggle to New York and DC a couple of years ago. (So now we have a Homeland Defense department. What were the other guys supposed to be defending?)

NASA, of course, is part of the whole dangerous military–industrial welfare program. Predictably, NASA is actually inhibiting the development of space travel by strangling competition — as a new book, Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age, argues. (Buy the book!)

Forget about Bush’s martial Martian boondoggle; what the off-world needs now is legal lunar homesteading.