The only one of you characters who has any balls is Dennis Kucinich, and you sorry sons-of-bitches had to run him out of the race

I have a lengthy post about the SOTU which will be up Wednesday night. In the meantime, here a 2 parts(out of 7) of a Real News interview with Gore Vidal from last year.

1.Gore Vidal on FDR: "he smiled benignly on the oil wells."




2.Gore Vidal on Truman:"Hiroshima was the end of the American republic"



3.Vidal on McCarthyism and the Military Comissions Act of 2006


4.Vidal on the US media: "the people have no voice because they have no information."

5.Vidal on the dems and religion.

If you want the other items they're at their site. I found the 1st two plus the one on the media the most interesting, the others less so.

in passing: Suharto

Initially I wanted to make the crack about how "only the good die young" upon hearing of Suharto's passing, but it occurs to me that in the recent geopolitical context that would suggest an appreciation of Benazir Bhutto that I never had.

While I didn't cheer her untimely death in December by any means, I recognize she and her husband were also judged to be kick-back dealing crooks, if on a somewhat smaller (and substantially less bloody) scale than Suharto and his family.

some additional thoughts[1.28]: occasional guest varmint Rob Payne has some pointed commentary about the US role in the subjugation of East Timor over at Halcyon Days.

Just as the US media tends to skip lightly over that, for some reason Suharto's US ties are also glossed over in The Year of Living Dangerously. Well, at least in the film. Anti-intellectual boob that I am, I dunno about the source novel. Then again, as Billy Kwan says, "If it's in focus, it's pornography, if it's out of focus, it's art." Maybe this is a guiding principle of journalism in some circles.

movie poster saturday: Ice station zebra

image courtesy impawards.com

There was a story that Howard Hughes liked watching Ice Station Zebra over and over again when he'd reached his nutty recluse stage. (Keep in mind this would be in the late 60s- early 70s, before video tape recorders were readily available. Of course I imagine being able to afford a 16mm print of the film wasn't exactly a big deal to Hughes.)

breaking the sound barrier

the Bell X-1 flew faster than mach 1 for the first time on 14 October 1947-- 60 years ago today. In my usually cursory looking about for info about the day's topic, I found out that X-1 pilot Chuck Yeager is A. still alive(and married to a woman 36 yrs his junior of whom his kids apparently disapprove) and
B. Has recently endorsed Duncan Hunter for president.(!?)



Milestones like this one, and their assorted peripheral data make me think again of a topic I often return to, of how I used to be able to appreciate things like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier and how cool-looking the X-1 is without the disagreeable tangential reflections about all sorts of other stuff that kinda spoiled it-- how the US changed since 1947, from the New Deal and the country that mostly still manufactured our own stuff and cared about domestic job creation, to the present shaky state of things.


Yes, I recognize it wasn't all peachy in '47; desegregation was still waiting in the future and we did intern thousands of Japanese-Americans during the war years, just because people were scared and it was politically useful, to name just two things.

Still, the Bell X-1 did look pretty cool.

things to read-- Sukhoi 33 edition

photo courtesy Aeroweb.lucia.it

Brian Beutler has Petraus's doctoral dissertation online in PDF, here. (It's pretty long.)

meanwhile, Castro criticizes the 2008 candidates. I find it hard to believe that Castro, wily old survivor that he is, might be unaware that when he criticizes Obama or HRC he only gives them credibility in many quarters over here.


from Rahul Mahajan's Empire notes, "The Real Iraq-Vietnam Analogy":

With Vietnam, we struggled hard and mostly successfully as a nation to make sure we didn’t learn the true lessons of the war. And with Iraq, we are on track to the same achievement, although this time it seems the path will be much easier.

This is a similarity that George Bush, a man who seemingly has never learned anything from anything or anyone in his entire life, is well positioned to appreciate.
[...]
Perhaps we could have learned instead that the cold war and the war on terror were not just mis-executed but misconceived?

We have apparently learned, from both of these wars, that America’s legendary good intentions are apparently not enough to ensure a good outcome. Perhaps we could have learned instead that it’s very easy to assume you have good intentions, but that, on close examination, it often turns out that you really don’t?

from the Jerusalem Post(via Xymphora, here)
"Analysis: Russia uses Syrian port to demonstrate its power in the Med"

In January 1996, the Russian Navy aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov came very close to Israeli territorial waters. On January 27, it launched several advanced Su-33 fighters, the naval version of the Su-27. The jets ventured into Israeli air space near Haifa. IAF planes were scrambled to intercept, but a skirmish was avoided.

The incident was kept secret for six years and was only revealed in 2002 in an article in the Israel Air Force magazine.

According to the report, Russian planes entered Israel's airspace at least twice and several F-16 scrambled for an intercept mission after an intrusion alert was received.

One assumes, nevertheless, that the Clinton administration became apprised of this at the time.


and Wikipedia's Russian Air Force entry notes that:

Russia resumed the Soviet-era practice of sending its bomber aircraft on long-range flights at a permanent basis in July and August 2007, after a 15-year unilateral suspension due to fuel costs and other economic difficulties after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Patrols towards the North Pole, the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean were reinstated, bringing the planes often close to NATO territory.

Does GWB miss the cold war,when other people fought in his place and he got to fly for the Texas Air National Guard by day and party every night with booze and cocaine? Is he hoping to start another one?


see also BBC News: "Russia restarts Cold War patrols"

Operation Ajax at 54

image via globalsecurity.org

In spite of his once having been chosen Time's man of the year, I'll bet most Americans don't know who Mohamed Mossadeq was. Likewise, I imagine most Americans don't know that British intelligence and our CIA overthrew Mr. Mossadeq after he nationalized Iran's oil companies and kicked BP out(the nerve!), forcing him out of office on August 19th, 1953, after he was democratically elected two years earlier, putting the Shah in his place.

Of course, given the general mendacity and sheer horribleness of most popular American news outlets, I can't entirely blame most Americans for being mystified by the question-- "why do they hate us?"

from wikipedia's entry on Operation Ajax:

The leader of Operation Ajax was Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., a senior CIA officer, and grandson of the former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. While formal leadership was vested in Kermit Roosevelt, the project was designed and executed by Donald Wilber, a career CIA agent and acclaimed author of books on Iran, Afghanistan and Ceylon.

The CIA operation centered around having the increasingly impotent Shah dismiss the powerful Prime Minister Mossadegh and replace him with General Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans after careful examination for his likeliness to be anti-Soviet.

The BBC spearheaded Britain's propaganda campaign, broadcasting the code word to start the coup.[1]

Despite the high-level coordination and planning, the coup d'etat briefly faltered, and the Shah fled Iran. After a short exile in Italy, however, the Shah was brought back again, this time through follow-up CIA operations, which were successful. Zahedi was installed to succeed Prime Minister Mossadegh. The deposed Mossadegh was arrested, given what some have alleged to have been a show trial, and condemned to death. The Shah commuted this sentence to solitary confinement for three years in a military prison, followed by house arrest for life.

In 2000, the New York Times made partial publication of a leaked CIA document titled, "Clandestine Service History – Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran – November 1952-August 1953." This document describes the planning and execution conducted by the American and British governments. The New York Times published this critical document with the names censored. The New York Times also limited its publication to scanned image (bitmap) format, rather than machine-readable text. This document was eventually published properly – in text form, and fully unexpurgated. The complete CIA document ...[is now available on the web.] The word 'blowback' appeared for the very first time in this document.

[...]
In 2000, then. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that the coup was a "setback for democratic government" in Iran.[2]

[1]BBC: "a very British coup"

[2]CNN:"U.S. Comes Clean About The Coup In Iran", 04-19-2000.


Of course, speaking of history lessons, it would've been nice if the democrats running for president had made a passing refrence to Mossadeq in the debate this weekend, but perhaps that's expecting too much. A time travel-fantasy-- not 54 years, just a few hours, and me there in the audience, being given a chance to speak(and actually being miked by the teevee networks): I would say, when they failed to see why I wanted them to mention Operation Ajax and Mossadeqh, "but what about timeliness, and relevance?" And I imagine HRC and Obama just staring at me while the crickets chirped. Then after a sufficient pause, they'd go back to talking about why we need to stay in Iraq longer, and their avoidance of reminding people of the "off-the-table" discussion with respect to Iran would have nothing to do with the possible embarassment of the confluence with this particular anniversary, and (the apparently diminishing)possibility that bigshot lefty blogger might mention it. Nothing at all.

Meanwhile-- I've been working, off and on, on a couple of longer pieces, including one on the apparent build-up to war with Iran, which I mean to post in 2 or 3 days.

Incidentally, I didn't know about the BBC's complicity until I worked on this post. The link above also has another audio link to a radio program(-me) about their involvement, which is about 25 minutes long and pretty interesting.

About the BBC's code word: it was used in a sentence in a time check at midnight-- in other words, every midnight the announcer would say, "the time is midnight," except when he gave the signal to start the coup by saying "the time is exactly midnight."