Phil Carter on the six year free fall of America

Phil (Intel Dump) Carter is my most trusted perspective on the American conquest/occupation/entrapment of/in Iraq. After Phil, things trail off rather sharply, due to my inverted trust in Cheney Bush (if they say it's sunny I pack my umbrella) and the extreme danger of in-country journalism.

Phil comments on a Zbignew Brzezinski editorial in WaPo: INTEL DUMP - The only thing we have to fear is . . . us. In brief, the choices of Cheney/Bush have been a disaster for the US and the world.

And yet ... I still think that we're extremely vulnerable as a society to attacks that would dwarf the destruction of the twin towers. Much of the reaction to 9/11 has been driven not only by what happened, but also by what imaginative people thought could and would happen next. Brzezinski wrote:

... The terror entrepreneurs, usually described as experts on terrorism, are necessarily engaged in competition to justify their existence. Hence their task is to convince the public that it faces new threats. That puts a premium on the presentation of credible scenarios of ever-more-horrifying acts of violence, sometimes even with blueprints for their implementation...

So is he saying the scenarios were and are not credible? Scanning the rest of the editorial he seems to be saying the threats are indeed credible, but that our responses to date are a panicked, ineffective and dangerous distraction for what we should be doing.

My position is that while Cheney/Bush are the most incompetent American leadership since the end of the 19th century, that the danger is real. That makes their failures all the worse. We have been digging holes instead of building dikes. [1]

[1] Note, invading Afghanistan is not an exception to the Cheney/Bush disaster. That was an automatic and valuable response -- not even Cheney/Bush can completely mess up everything.