Bush Creating the Second Ottoman Empire?

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing click to enlarge I read Booman's story on Bush's new secret plan to fight Iraqis from Turkey. Turkey is all bent out of shape over the 4000 members of Kurdistan Workers Party militia that are staging attacks against Turks. Bush prefers this instead of using the regular Kurdistan army that numbers about a quarter of a million troops. After finishing Booman's post on this, it sounded a whole lot like the Mongols and the Silk Road. From Wikipedia... The Mongol expansion throughout the Asian continent from around 1215 to 1360 helped bring political stability and re-establish the Silk Road vis-à-vis Karakorum. With rare exceptions such as Marco Polo or Christian missionaries such as William of Rubruck, few Europeans traveled the entire length of the Silk Road. Instead traders moved products much like a bucket brigade, with luxury goods being traded from one middleman to another, from China to the West, and resulting in extravagant prices for the trade goods. The disintegration of the Mongol Empire led to the collapse of the Silk Road's political unity. Also falling victim were the cultural and economic aspects of its unity. Turkic tribes seized the western end of the Silk Road from the decaying Byzantine Empire, and sowed the seeds of a Turkic culture that would later crystallize into the Ottoman Empire under the Sunni faith. Turkic-Mongol military bands in Iran, after some years of chaos were united under the Saffavid tribe, under whom the modern Iranian nation took shape under the Shiite faith. Meanwhile Mongol princes in Central Asia were content with Sunni orthodoxy with decentralized princedoms of the Chagatay, Timurid and Uzbek houses. In the Kypchak-Tatar zone, Mongol khanates all but crumbled under the assaults of the Black Death and the rising power of Muscovy. In the east end, the Chinese Ming Dynasty overthrew the Mongol yoke and pursued a policy of economic isolationism. Yet another force, the Kalmyk-Oyrats pushed out of the Baikal area in central Siberia, but failed to deliver much impact beyond Turkestan. Some Kalmyk tribes did manage to migrate into the Volga-North Caucasus region, but their impact was limited. The parallels are spectacular. Just swap the silk with oil and you have Operation Enduring Freedom minus another Chinese revolution. But it could happen, it is only Monday and Bush is still in office.

Al Qaeda Map of the World

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing click to enlarge I had the most depressing meeting of my life yesterday (and in some ways uplifting but on a personal level that would bore you to tears). The reason it was depressing is because of who it was with and our discussion of the state of the world. My meeting was with a friend of mine who is a military contractor and a former Republican. This guy is one of the last bastions of business leaders in America who "get it." He has no problem making piles of cash, but he makes sure he EARNS it and he sure as hell does. He is one of the hardest workers I know and can work magic with troubled companies. He strives to keep manufacturing and jobs in the US but I believe in his heart, those days are numbered. As we discussed the state of the world, and the tragedy of the Bush Administration, he has declared the American Dream is dead as a doornail. "If you want the American Dream, go work in Europe, it is alive and well there. Bush has so destroyed the middle class, I doubt it can return with the business leaders we have now." Then we lamented the lack of leadership in corporate America. Over the last few years I have met with a lot of CEOs that frankly of no business running a business. The level of corruption and total lack of foresight is very troubling. These anti-CEOs are either running their business into the ground or flip the business and cash out - then go on to ruin another company. We talked more about how to fix it. One of his fast "emergency fixes" is "Vote Hillary Or Else!" The "else" being the total collapse of American society, economy and government. Keep in mind this is coming from a "life-long Republican" who voted straight tickets up until 2004 - Kerry was his first Democratic vote and remember, he is a military contractor. Maybe I am depressed for no reason. If someone like my friend can make such an extreme turnaround, maybe the rest of the country has had similar flashes of Jeffersonian insight? Regardless, we both agreed the Bush Administration is just a front for Big Oil and Cheney is guiding the chariots to secure and exploit the last of the fossil fuel resources in the world. It is all about oil - everything. Iraq? Oil. Gonzales? Oil. Warrantless wiretaps? Oil. All of it. In every scandal there it the recurring stain of fossil fuel. I am very tired of BushCo's oil slick.

How Lesbian Culture Can Explain BushCo

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing click to enlarge And no, I am not talking about THAT kinda bush. The premium cable channel Showtime has a show called The L Word, and one character, Alice, has developed a chart to explain the sexual and emotional relationships of the characters on the show. Well, it just so happens that Alice's chart is a great tool to illustrate who is screwing who over in the Bush Administration. After close examination of this chart, it really does explain my chaffing.

Who isn’t selling us down river?

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing click to enlarge Where is what Wikipedia has to say on fascism: Fascism is associated by many scholars with one or more of the following characteristics: a very high degree of nationalism, economic corporatism, a powerful, dictatorial leader who portrays the nation, state or collective as superior to the individuals or groups composing it. First off, our government has sold us off to the highest corporate bidder. No longer are the needs of We The People met, but the needs of the Corporation are set higher than the individual. Big Oil has attacked democracy by price gouging, the insistence of gross over consumption and lobbying to prevent alternative fuels from coming to market. Why bring about a hydrogen economy - a renewable resource, when over $90 trillion in fossil fuel is still in the ground? Profit Over People should be the official tag line for the healthcare industry. Most drugs today are either wholly funded or partially funded by the US taxpayers, yet these medical discoveries and patents are not considered owned by We The People, nor does the US Treasury see any windfall from these outrageous profits from medical and pharmaceutical research. If the taxpayers finance the development, the drugs should be generic - right off the bat. The military industrial complex is one of the worst. HALF of our non-discretionary budget goes to funding war and the preparation of war. Instead of using that money to buy off a dictator a week or bring peace via diplomatic channels, we build new nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction that we block other countries from NOT developing. If we used half of our defense budget to buy off dictators, would could wipe out war on this planet in just a few months. That is how Bill Clinton controlled North Korea - the good old fashion bribe. God love him.

Thomas Friedman: We're In Iraq For Oil

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers' Alliance. In an unusually lucid column, former Iraq War enthusiast Thomas Friedman makes a plea for a responsible policy for military disengagement from Iraq. I'll go straight to the punch line: You can’t be serious about getting out of Iraq if you’re not serious about getting off oil. In other words, it's the oil stupid. Friedman has a long history of talking out of both sides of his mouth on Iraq. (On many things actually.) And this is not the first time he's let the well-oiled cat slip out of the bag. In the face of the failure of the government/media campaign to build mass support for a US invasion of Iraq, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has felt obliged to come to the aid of the Bush war cabal by proposing a shift in its propaganda. Hence Friedman’s January 5 column headlined “A War for Oil?” In this thoroughly cynical piece, Friedman concedes what is obvious to anyone who has followed the US military buildup against Iraq with any objectivity: Bush’s plan to invade the country is driven, above all, by a determination to seize control of Iraqi oil.... He continues: “Let’s cut the nonsense. The primary reason the Bush team is more focused on Saddam [than on North Korea] is because if he were to acquire weapons of mass destruction, it might give him the leverage he has long sought—not to attack us, but to extend his influence over the world’s largest source of oil, the Persian Gulf.” Thus, having acknowledged that the US government is lying to the American people and the world, Friedman seeks to fashion a new justification for war against Iraq. It is not a matter of self-defense, or even countering something Iraq has done. Rather, the country must be attacked and occupied because the regime might—in the future—extend its influence over the world’s largest oil reserves. Yet, in his relentless cheer-leading for the war he has since soured on, he offered up gems like this one: The war in Iraq is the most important liberal, revolutionary US democracy- building project since the Marshall Plan. It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad. Friedman is one of those mind-meltingly wrong pundits who has managed to fail spectacularly upward. In "The Iraq Gamble," Jebediah Reed gets to the heart of his infuriating duplicity. Re-reading Friedman's columns from the six months or so prior to the invasion of Iraq can induce vertigo. Unlike many of his hawkish colleagues, he grokked all the vital details of the situation.... So even a Webelo-grade logician knows where to go from here, right? You connect the dots and conclude that while it would be very nice to get rid of Saddam, it would also be stupid and dangerous. But somehow he still managed to come out in favor of the war. And if the whole thing weren't so tragically misguided, his reasoning would be worth a chuckle. Says Friedman: "something in Mr. Bush's audacious shake of the dice appeals to me." A nice ballsy gamble of a war. Sure, it could throw the region into chaos, bankrupt this country, and dye the fertile crescent red with the blood of civilians; yet an audacious war is like a red lollipop—who isn't powerless to resist it? Red lollipop's aside, Friedman's pitch was always a sucker's bet. The author of "The Lexus and the Olive Branch," has always known full well what this war was really about and why his imperialistic self supported it. He has known from the beginning that it comes down that unctuous substance which drives the economic engine of the world. As Alien Abductee reported a few days ago, the Bush Administration's naked oil grab is reaching a crucial moment. As discussed here everything rides on getting the Iraqi Parliament to pass legislation which will open Iraq's oil reserves for exploitation by Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell. But the Iraqi's have been infuriating Bushco by dragging their heels on selling their souls. Their recalcitrance has been serious enough that Cheney was flown to the Mideast -- I'm assuming in some sort of portable hyperbaric chamber -- so that he could scold those shiftless Iraqis for threatening to take a summer break. For all the wrangling and veto threats, our own congress looks to be safely on board with a bid to railroad the Iraqis into giving over the bulk of their oil wealth to the conglomerates. The supplemental appropriation package requires the Iraqi government to meet a series of “benchmarks” President Bush established in his speech to the nation on January 10 (in which he made his case for the “surge”). Most of Mr. Bush’s benchmarks are designed to blame the victim, forcing the Iraqis to solve the problems George Bush himself created. One of the President’s benchmarks, however, stands apart. This is how the President described it: “To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.” A seemingly decent, even noble concession. That’s all Mr. Bush said about that benchmark, but his brevity was gravely misleading, and it had to be intentional. The Iraqi Parliament has before it today, in fact, a bill called the hydrocarbon law, and it does call for revenue sharing among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. For President Bush, this is a must-have law, and it is the only “benchmark” that truly matters to his Administration. Yes, revenue sharing is there-essentially in fine print, essentially trivial. The bill is long and complex, it has been years in the making, and its primary purpose is transformational in scope: a radical and wholesale reconstruction-virtual privatization-of the currently nationalized Iraqi oil industry. If passed, the law will make available to Exxon/Mobil, Chevron/Texaco, BP/Amoco, and Royal Dutch/Shell about 4/5’s of the stupendous petroleum reserves in Iraq. That is the wretched goal of the Bush Administration, and in his speech setting the revenue-sharing “benchmark” Mr. Bush consciously avoided any hint of it. "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist," (Keyser Soze) and the Bush Administration has as cleverly sustained the illusion that oil is not the underlying reason for pouring the American blood and treasure into the Iraqi sand. With prestidigitators like Thomas Friedman acting as front men, it wasn't too hard to pull off.