** First news item that struck me today was that Jay Garner, responsible for post-war Iraq, is to be replaced with "L. Paul Bremer, ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism in the Reagan administration".

""In terms of finding someone to manage this process, which has not started out well, I do not believe that [the White House] could have done better than to select Bremer, said Robert Gelbard, a retired career diplomat who led post-conflict efforts in Haiti, Bosnia and East Timor.


** America: the failed experiment - fuel your anti-systemic attitude with this article.

"Today, it is the most powerful nation on Earth in every sense of the word, except moral. The moral authority of the United States comes from the barrel of a gun."

[...]

"America's Founding Fathers called their dream "the great experiment" and perhaps that is because they understood this was a gamble; it might be the last conceivable untried form of government. Perhaps they knew that the illusion of "people power" was just that, an illusion. Perhaps they also knew that if the great experiment failed, there was nothing left to try; mankind would have proved once and for all that it was incapable of governing itself in a manner that is worthy of being called "civilized."

Well, it is failing."

cf. Kristol: "unapologetic, idealistic, assertive America that will foment pro-democratic revolutions around the world, if necessary at the point of a gun."

Hang on - democratic at the point of a gun? Revolution? If a country produces people with actual power that start throwing incompletely understood words around in a reactionary manner then yes, the experiment looks a terrible failure to me. The PNAC must have forced just about every thinker, left or right, to turn in his grave.

Am sure, the spritual fathers of 'that great nation' wouldn't mind a twist either:

"In 1953 President Dwight Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander, dismissed the idea of a preventative war against the Soviet Union. "All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler," he said. "I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."


** Also interesting is Monbiot's newest commentary on poverty ratings of the whole Bretton-Woods nonsense and what followed.

"The figures are compiled by the World Bank. It claims to know, to within the nearest 10,000, how many of the world's people are living below the international poverty line. The response of those who criticise the way the global economy works is to accept the bank's calculations, but to argue that there are more equitable and less destructive means of achieving the same results. But the figures are without foundation.

A new paper by the economist Sanjay Reddy and the philosopher Thomas Pogge demonstrates that the World Bank's methodology is so flawed that its calculations cannot possibly be correct. Not only does it appear wildly to underestimate the level of global poverty, but the downward trend it purports to show appears to be an artefact of the way in which it has been compiled. The World Bank's figures, against which the success or failure of the entire global economy is measured, are useless."

What a mediocre world! Shame on them all! We're being run by a hoard of morons.