[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Kevin Carson]

On 12/20/09, J. Andrew Rogers <reality.miner at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think that in many of these cases, all power players in the region
>  are members of the Guild of Calamitous Intent.  There is quite
>  literally no party the US could meaningfully or usefully support that
>  is not unsavory in some way. Consequently, it is a "damned if you do,
>  damned if you don't" situation where the only differentiator is
>  expediency.
>
>  Many (most?) times out in the real world your "choices" are all far
>  from ideal. And in the case that you don't make any choice at all and
>  simply ignore the situation, you get blamed for that too.

Possibly, but considering how much anti-American terrorism is blowback
from being an imperial power in parts of the world where American
presence is not desired, I believe simply dismantling overseas
military bases and carrier groups and bringing the troops back home,
and eliminating foreign aid (especially to Israel) would result in a
massive net reduction in hostility toward the U.S.  I don't buy into
the neocon belief that "they hate us, not for what we've done, but for
who we are."  And absent a military presence in the Middle East and
active support for Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, I doubt
anti-American terrorism would ever have become a serious issue in the
first place.

Simply staying out of things attracts a lot less blame.  I'm sure
there are Christian fundies who blame the U.S. for not doing a
full-scale Balkan or Somali intervention in Sudan, but that's nothing
compared to the scale of negative attention the U.S. would attract on
a global scale as an actual player in the conflict.  I can't imagine
the U.S. attracting a lot of negative commentary for simply shutting
up and staying out of Afghanistan from ca. 1978 on, but deliberately
destabilizing that country to lure the Russians into a quagmire and
then arming fundamentalists to fight the Russians had consequences
beyond the imagining of Brzezinski et al.

-- 
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