[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Kevin Carson]

On 12/20/09, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know.  I've seen fundamental Islam and what it does to children and
> women.   I've seen the US.  It's a pretty easy choice.
>
> I think we do the world a disservice when we don't choose the lesser of two
> evils.

That's true, if the choice is only one between living under
fundamentalist Islam, versus the kind of consumer capitalist society
we currently live under in the West.

But that question has little to do with the question of whether or not
the U.S. is unrivalled hegemon on a global scale.

It's a good idea to ignore the U.S. government's self-professed
motivations, and look at what it's actually doing.  Its "good reasons"
for what it's doing seldom have much at all to do with what its actual
reasons are.

In regard to radical Islam, the U.S. Gov only has problems with
military dictators or Muslim fundamentalists when they don't do what
they're told or when they become a liability to the global corporate
system.  The U.S. liked Muslim fundamentalists just fine in
Afghanistan when it was the USSR they were fighting, and it liked them
just fine in the Balkans when they were fighting Milosevic.

In general the U.S. tends to prefer a certain kind of formal democracy
(the kind of spectator democracy promoted by the NED/Soros
Foundation/IRI) over military oligarchies, because it's less messy and
less of a PR problem.  But it will replace a comparatively democratic
system with a military dictatorship in a heartbeat when it judges the
military oligarchs will be more pliable in accommodating global
corporate interests (e.g. repeated attempts at military overthrow of
Hugo Chavez).

Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein were both CIA clients, installed by
the U.S., who were later cut loose when they stopped playing ball.

If Satan were a CIA client, and his arch-devils were all trained in
torture at the School of the Americas, and tomorrow he stopped taking
orders from Washington, you can be sure that the day after that Gibb
would be up at the White House podium announcing in shocked tones all
the awful stuff they'd "just discovered" was going on in Hell.  And
then a 25-year-old photo would surface of Don Rumsfeld shaking hands
with the Devil.

The point is, we're not going to be governed by radical Islam in the
U.S. in any case.  And the kinds of regimes the U.S. promotes overseas
have little to do with the real values of the American people.  The
reason things are better inside the U.S. than elsewhere in the world
is that it's better to be inside the tent when Uncle Sam is inside
pissing out.  Overseas, despite all the idealistic rhetoric about
"promoting democracy" and "stability," the U.S. has supported some of
the most tyrannical and genocidal monsters in history.

As a simple practical matter, most of the U.S. government's ostensible
aims are unattainable.  Once Saddam was overthrown it was inevitable
that Iraq was going to be governed by some sort of theocratic-leaning
Shiite coalition, and that it would be in Iran's strategic sphere of
influence.  It's inevitable now that Afghanistan's territory will be
governed by local tribal and clan-based entities with strong
fundamentalist leanings, and that the national government exists
largely on paper, regardless of what Obama's surge does; it's
delusional even to refer to an "Afghan people" or an Afghan "nation,"
because no such thing exists--it's just a catchall name the Brits came
up with for convenience, to describe all the unorganized crap between
Persia and the Raj. The administrative costs of maintaining a genuine
central government with real powers over the territory of Afghanistan
would exceed its GDP.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html