Snafus avoided

Why wasn’t this one avoided?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/blue-skies-from-pain/

Try contributing to a discussion instead of whoring your blog links here. I can’t understand why you’re allowed to post here.

Some of these look like offhand comments that were never supposed to be taken literally, but don’t let that stand in the way of a good top ten list.

Ahh….
The old “Only tool is a hammer” problem.
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Thanks for linking.

FP forgot this one:

“Nonetheless, Cosgriff’s demeanor angered Cheney, according to the former senior intelligence official. But a lesson was learned in the incident: The public had supported the idea of retaliation, and was even asking why the U.S. didn’t do more. The former official said that, a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’ he said.”

Does Cheney count as a “civilian thinker supposedly on our side”?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/some-stunt/

They forgot to include this cockamamie scheme concocted by some think-tank in 2000: as the US no longer has any military rival, we should dramatically increase defense spending to develop high-tech weaponry and build a series of bases throughout the heart of the middle east- this, they theorized, would end terrorism, have the world grateful for benevolent US might and create a century of US prosperity. Just imagine the havoc that unrealistic scheme would have caused…

Operation Northwoods didn’t make the list because it was conceived and approved by the Joint Chiefs only to be “quashed” by JFK, right?

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf

When Jesse says, “governments do things to get us into wars”, what does he mean by “governments”?

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/ring-the-bells/

In each of the examples presented, I could think of at least one instance in which the scenario actually occurred. Gates Contra suggestion, trifling with Russia, assassination of country leaders, insane and unnecessary wage of war. Clinton’s ninja comment is obviously pulling nothing out of nothing, a casual joke, out of place with the others. Foreign Policy must have had space to fill to allow this sloppy piece of writing to pass.

Not to mention the biggest “cockamamie scheme”, that we didn’t avoid. Such as invading a sovereign nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 on the pretext that they might have weapons of mass destruction.
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Must’ve been a slow day at Foreign Policy.

Pardon the tangent, but the picture reminds me of an article I read a while back:
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The Children’s Crusade
US Navy Cmdr (retired) Huber (link)
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“The 50-year Long War embraced by the Pentagon and its allies in the military-industrial-congressional complex is by far the most insidious policy ever dealt to the American public from the bottom of the deck…
(…)
War has become America’s top export. Military recruiting is through the roof because of the poor economy. How pathetic it is that the most powerful nation on earth has nothing to offer its youth but war. Even more pathetic is the kind of war the nation has to offer them.
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COIN, the acronym for counterinsurgency, has replaced airpower and nuclear weapons as the latest “truth” in American warfare. COIN’s basic premise calls for “effective governance by a legitimate government.” We don’t have effective or legitimate governance in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we’re not going to have it. Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite government will never “unify” with the Sunni and Kurd factions in Iraq, and Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government is a mob of drug dealers and warlords. We’re fighting wars that by our own definition are doomed to fail.
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We’re fighting junk wars to prop up junk governments with junk strategies and we’re giving our kids junk body armor to fight them with.
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And we’re recruiting children to keep these wars alive for as long as we can.
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God help America.”