Re: [A-List] Blowback?

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

> If America is "forced" to put down Al-quaida
> coups in the Gulf, and occupies those oil-fields as well, will that be
the
> law of unintended consequences?, or the result of sound Imperial
> preparation, and clarity of purpose.

I share the skepticism about "blowback" theses.  It has smelled like a
morality play from the beginning.  I think Saudi Arabia is the target...
well, China at the end of the day, via Saudi.  But I still think the
preparation is unsound, and the clarity of purpose is based as much on
grandiosity and hubris as it is on cold calculation.

The contradictions are not in Afghan resistance or anything else
thereabouts, but in the evolution of a new "organic composition of the US
military," the cost of which is astronomical (and which degrades an already
degraded military leadership), situated in a very unfavorable economic
conjuncture, and in what forces will be emboldened by the inevitable
stretch-out of US resources and the corresponding political crisis at home.

People don't seem to appreciate how fragile is American society - the
entropic potential it has contained within it, to use my overused analog -
and how quickly the domestic basis of all these adventures might come to
harm.  We are a society that contians within it the fertile seeds of
tribalism and reaction... and resistance to the same.