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great post, as usual, by starroute.
Looking at starroute's original question - whether the MIC is either a coherent conspiracy or a super-organism - if we take Sibel's allegations and push them a little bit, it's not difficult to come to a possible 'conclusion' that there is indeed a coherent conspiracy - in fact, in the simple version of the conspiracy, we don't even need to push the allegations very far at all.
Where you have ologopolistic industries, regulations are *always* required to prevent stuff like price collusion - for example, it is illegal for competitors to discuss pricing with each other. We don't have to look very far to see why, or to see that organisations will collude at the first opportunity - even where there are criminal penalties. Look at the AIG case in the insurance industry for example - and you have 'competitors' putting in false (high) bids on certain contracts, presumably with an explicit promise that the favour will be returned on a different contract.
If you take Sibel's claims - with respect to say the American Turkish Council and I suspect that AIPAC is equally in play here, although it doesn't get as much attention (wrt her case) - they can basically be conceived of as 'fronts' for the MIC (more so than representatives of Turkey and Israel) - and when I say 'fronts,' I mean that they have effectively become fronts, aka they have been white-anted, which may be different from their original purpose. So these organizations are the 'smoke-filled-rooms' where the behemoths of the MIC meet and devise their 'coherent conspiracy' - which at it's simplest is to sell as much product, at the highest profit, as possible. We know that this sort of arrangement can lead to all sorts of troublesome 'market' outcomes when leaders in any industry meet (think tobacco, insurance, banking, oil etc) - when the MIC does it, knowing that they are immune from prosecution (because of the bribes and the threat of job losses), and knowing their product, then it becomes particularly problematic.
Now - if you want to push Sibel's allegations to the edge, it's not too difficult to imagine that there is a fully integrated vertical industry in place - where the MIC itself is actually dealing the heroin and the logistics arm of the MIC is the Pentagon. We start to get into some definitional issues here - I strongly suspect that it isn't the 'MIC' that is profiting from dealing the heroin - but perhaps that it's the 'executives' of the MIC who are getting all the profits and laundering them through the banking centers in dubai and cyprus etc.
Interestingly, despite the fact that Sibel implicates the 'geostrategists' - and the region she describes is part of the grand resource-chessboard - I don't think I've ever heard her mention oil in any substantive sense.
And if you really want to push Sibel's claims to the edge, it's not inconceivable that she's saying that the ATC (and AIPAC) are an 'arm' of 'al-Qaeda' (or perhaps even al-Qaeda headquarters) - which comes back to starroute's point that maybe the MIC is a "coherent conspiracy, consciously manipulating US domestic spending and foreign policy to its own ends."
I'm sure it won't be lost on you that the same OSP cabal that cooked up the iraq invasion - via delusion and/or groupthink and/or whatever else - are the same people that Sibel is fingering.
(now is probably a good time to introduce steven andreson's post - but one more dollop of starroute first)
Now to starroute's final question:
"Are they just in it for the money -- or is there a fanatical, xenophobic, perhaps Christianoid mindset behind them as well?"Y'all know my default position on that question - but in terms of xenophobia, specifically, we have a substantial body of evidence that these same people have supported pakistan for the best part of 3 decades, including helping them build, and sell, nuclear weapons, and we have them dealing with Turkey, and we have them selling weapons to the chechens, and helping the KLA. So that seems to answer part of the question. On the other hand, we know that the pentagon is freakishly christianist - is that a design flaw, or a design feature? I don't know.
ok - so here's steven andreson's post
I am drawn back to considering the 9-11 murders. We were told that bin Laden organized these attacks out of Afghanistan, yet there was very little explaination how that was done. Here, we are told that Afghanistan is the center of the opium and drug trade going to Europe. However, the routes and the wherewithalls involving Turkey, for example, are not discussed.Lots of great issues raised here. I've tried to get my head around many of them before.
If we can easily see that the U.S. intelligence services or some American crime organizations are behind the drug trade, why shouldn't we have the same question about 9-11?
The physics of the 9-11 bombings are confusing to me because I don't understand about how to demolish these buildings or operating these planes.
The motivations behind these attacks, are just as confusing, but it seems understanding the why's should be more important.
So, did we go to war with Afghanistan, despite the cooperation of the Taliban in the possible recovery of bin Laden because the Taliban were not supportive enough of American control of the poppy fields?
Did the United States support the Islamic resistance to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in order to obtain control or to maintain control of opium production?
How much of our attack on Afghanistan was about drugs instead of bin Laden? After all, bin Laden has not been captured and the poppy fields under United States control have had record outputs.
If Afghanistan is about opium, and the Europeans are the one's whose populations suffer from this production, why haven't they exposed this fact? Are the elites in Europe making too much out of the drug trade to spend any effort protecting their own populations?
Would Turkey's involvement in the drug trade be exposed and the role of the United States crime organizations and corrupt politicians thwarted if Turkey became a member of the European Union? Or not?
Is the war on terrorism really a way to obscure the fact that American politicians and their benefactors are drug dealers?
I was under the impression that the stock market was kept from collapsing mostly by the influx of drug money laudered through American banks and investments. Is this true, and if so, wouldn't this be another motivation for 9-11? Was the attack part of a plan to maintain this kind of market manipulation?
I have questions, but at the moment, no answers.
The motivation of 911? I have no idea why osama would want to do it (in the official version) - the official narrative is apparently that he wanted to get the US quagmired in iraq or somewhere. if so, osama: 2, democracy-givers: 0. But as we've seen, I don't really think that there are strong delineators between *ahem* good and evil - so that complicates things a whole lot. Similarly, if we are to suggest that the neocons and osama are on the same side, then we presumably need to account for the 93 attack on the wtc - and i don't really know how to do that.
In terms of control of the afghan poppy fields - whether during the soviet war, or the 2001 invasion - and the implications of the booming poppy supply over the last few years - I've mentioned a few times that I've been trying to do an 'industry analysis' of the heroin trade for a month or so now (which is why i was particularly interested in this World Bank report.) In most industries, an increase of supply of 300% (or whatever) is terrible for profitability - so i'm not one to immediately jump to the conclusion that the booming supply is great for business. OTOH - standard strategy analysis tells us that if you have really high margins, then you should actually try to reduce them by selling as much as possible (particularly when you can't 'brand' your product).
I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence that heroin consumption has increased dramatically in the last 5 years - there's some anecdotal evidence that heroin deaths have jumped 75% in 3 years in LA - but that appears to be related to heroin quality more than increased consumption. and we have some evidence that the market share of afghan/turkish heroin in the US has tripled to 15% - but the details are all a bit murky. remember - the turkish producers were supplying 90-ish% of the european market, and only 5% of the US market. The 'obvious' advice from any corporate strategist would be to try to cut back on the supply, and increase the price, so that you could take advantage of the euro-monopoly - rather than flood the market and try to raise market share in the US. So it's all a bit baffling.
As for Turkey's admission into the European Union - I don't really know how that plays out, net-net. it's difficult to imagine how it could make importing drugs any easier (they don't seem to have any problems today).
Is the war on terrorism really a way to obscure the fact that American politicians and their benefactors are drug dealers?i don't really think so - but they are perhaps related. It appears that the politicians don't really need any obscuring. otoh, it appears that the MIC and the heroin trade are intrinsically entwined - and TWOT is undoubtedly a great MIC boondoggle - so perhaps there is a connection. As starroute notes, TWOT is also a propaganda play by (in part) the christianist billionaires - but I have no idea what motivates these people.
that is all.
There is a mystery for me about the military-industrial complex -- in large part because it's so faceless. It's regularly described on one hand as though it consisted of nothing more than massive corporations staffed by anonymous CEO's plus a pack of revolving-door former military officers -- and on the other as though it was a coherent conspiracy, consciously manipulating US domestic spending and foreign policy to its own ends.
It can't be both, can it? But if it isn't, then which? Can something like the military-industrial complex turn into a sort of super-organism, carefully maintaining its own existence and continued growth even without a guiding intellect? Or is there some sort of deliberate direction to the whole thing, fixed on certain definite goals and not merely stomping around and smashing things like Godzilla?
One thing I do know is that the military-industrial complex originally was born out of extreme right-wing Cold War politics. When Eisenhower warned against it, he wasn't just pointing out an abstract threat for the future. The military-industrial complex had been actively frustrating his policies during the last couple of years of his administration, starting after the launching of Sputnik and the invention of the missile gap.
The American Security Council was central to it at that point. There's an interesting blog post about all this here -- which is too long to quote in full, but the relevant section of which begins:
In 1958 ASC launched the Institute for American Strategy (IAS) for the purpose of further spreading Cold War political propaganda among the public, indoctrinating public policy "elites" and military personnel in the ideology of right wing think, emphasizing the importance of powerful military industrial complex interests and trying to convince anyone they could buttonhole that commies had infiltrated the master suites of government. ACS sponsored events such as the National Military Conferences which were essentially git-to-know-ya gatherings for Pentagon officials and National Security Council big wigs looking to hoot it up, share shrimp cocktails and exchange boing-eyed scare stories with corporate executives from such board rooms as United Fruit and Standard Oil.
Recall Eisenhower warning of the power of the military industrial complex -- these are the very people of whom he was speaking. The IAS was funded by the right wing Richardson Foundation (H. Smith Richardson) and administered by "political warfare" advocate/expert Frank Barnett and long time ASC member Col. William Kintner. IAS president was John M. Fisher. Barnett was research director for the Richardson Foundation as well. . . .
In 1962 Barnett co-founds (and becomes president) of the National Strategy Information Center. Others affiliated with or advising the NSIC over the years include Joseph Coors, Frank Shakespeare (Heritage Foundation) and former CIA director William J. Casey. As well as this feller right here ---- Prescott Bush.
The MIC bunch had things pretty much their own way through the 60's, but with the fading of the Cold War in the 70's, a change in direction became necessary. That was where George H.W. Bush's Team B came in -- with its connections to the old Cold Warriors of ASC and the Committee on the Present Danger on one hand and to the Neocons on the other. (Paul Wolfowitz was a leading advisor.) The immediate outcome was both a partial re-kindling of the Cold War, which continued through the 1980's, and the invention of the Great War on Terror as an increasingly important substitute for the Cold War.
The rogue CIA guys like Shackley and Clines were part of that nexus as well -- because of both their own Cold War fanaticism and their association with Bush -- and they were the ones who added in the drugs-and-arms connection.
That 1970's mix of obsessed generals, Neocons, and profiteering spooks -- with a few Bushes thrown in for flavoring -- is clearly at the root of much of what's wrong right now. But as I said in starting, it's the role of the big military contractors that perplexes me. Are they just in it for the money -- or is there a fanatical, xenophobic, perhaps Christianoid mindset behind them as well?