At least according to one especially cogent economist one of our resident financial reporters linked to. It was pointed out that the first thing the U.S. did in Libya was to cancel payment of debts to Russia. Naturally Russia isn't eager for a repeat of that. I don't know that there is anyone left in the world who can stand up to the U.S. [arm of multi-national corporations]. The theory given was that a cornerstone of U.S. strategy is to keep oil and money away from any actors with a chance of challenging U.S. military hegemony, especially Russia and China.

The reason it's all about terrorism, imho, is that there are no state actors left who can mount a direct challenge. In the insane minds of far too many powerful people, the only resistance to world domination will come from clandestine groups. Over the last decade, we have seen a tremendous strengthening of the ability to handle popular resistance--militarizing police forces, drastically increasing clandestine forces and private forces to further buffer troops from democratic control, inuring troops to killing and torture of civilians, to carrying out operations in residential areas, drones, constant propaganda creating caricatures of imagined enemies, and so much more.

Sorry to drift so far afield. These days to me, drone attacks in Pakistan, bombing in Syria, and imprisoning Katrina survivors without due process--it's all part of the same dynamic. And all done right out in the open in front of an enthralled citizenry. Tough times.

Someone will write a heart-breaking history of how savages and vandals from the West destroyed the ancient culture from the cradle of human civilization. The nearly complete destruction of the culture of Iraq is one of the great crimes of modern history, rivaling the Shoah in its enormity. I am not exaggerating. It is painful to imagine the alternative world we would be living in now had the European powers partnered with the ME following WWII at a time when there was a great hunger for modernization and democracy. I believe Western perfidy and degeneracy in dealing with the ME is on a par with the treatment of native Americans. The rise of aggressive fundamentalism can be traced directly to exploitation and insults by the West leading to desperate attempts to protect what was thought of as culture. Of course, in such pressured circumstances, the result is usually perverted culture. Of course, the West has had their fingers in fanning radical Islam since WWII, continuing to naively believe that they can cynically control the genii once he's out of the bottle despite decades of proof to the contrary.

Andrew Bacevich is perhaps the most authoritative commenter consistently pointing out that these neo-con fantasies spring from ignorance of the reality of war. Once you start a war, he says, no one can predict where it will go. War is messy. The success of the Madison Avenue ad machine and the subsequent 24/7 propaganda machine has them thinking they can, in perhaps the most chilling words of the last decade, "Create their own reality." They will learn to all our suffering that there is more to reality than hypnotizing people into believing what is not true.

We are ruled by psychopaths. I'll watch that interview now.