do you fault reagan/bush/rumsfeld for supplying saddam, thus providing counterbalance to iran?
"""Eg, I do not fault Reagan in the least for supplying Afghan mujahideen with stingers."""
Maybe one of the better movies I've ever seen. there is a message in there... I just don't know how to apply it and that is the tragedy, I don't think that anyone does.
Samuel Goldwyn : "if you want to send a mesage, use Western Union."
You see BSD, a problem with Hollywood is : deep down, it's totally shallow. As are it's entertainment products. I try to enjoy them on the entertainment level only, and nothing much more.
If you want depth and a message, read a book. And even then it's a crapshoot. Stick to reading my posts, you won't go too wrong too often.
Better still, read Jack0's. Wait, wait, wait up; you already are one of his most devoted readers.
-- Modified on 10/1/2007 8:05:57 PM
For one thing, "deep down, its shallow".... if that doesn't give you a headache just trying to wrap your mind around that notion....
*I* live in Hollywood!!!!!
you lookin for a new topic for us to fight about? Well this time, Bud... it ain't gonna work. Remember...
*I* live in Hollywood!!!!!
... come to think of it though... you're right. We in Hollywood never produce anything but fluff. Schindler's List was a puff piece, Sophie's Choice was actually an Avery Schreiber Improv, and Citizen Kane was an infomercial for snowglobes. We leave the real substance for serious filmmakers like Woody Allen, Roger Corman, and the late Russ Meyer.
Doc, you're a hollywood mogul as well? Does that give you any additional cachet in the civvie world? As in "baby, I'm gonna make you a star"? Man, if i had that to boast of, I'd be going through civies like the Ebola Virus through a totally unexposed population. Can I send you cartons full of unspeakably bad story ideas, reams of vapid and inane additional dialogue, horrible one-liners, half-assed treatments, terminally bad original stories, and never-finished-for-excellent-reasons screenplays? And I look pretty good in sunglasses to boot! BTW, do you know Joe Esterhausz?
The alternate, suggested by a friend some years ago, was "deep down there is no deep down." Work better? [I think he was inspired by Dorothy Parker's[?] quip about Oakland : "there is no there there." Or was it Gertrude Stein/ Well, no matter].
How about, "scratch the surface of Hollywood, and you'll find yourself at it's core"?
Or, "Hollywood - where creativity and originality come to meet a quick but painful death."
Actually, i meant Bollywood : "at it's most original, it's totally derivative." But please pass the Vindaloo. And can you hook me up with Elizabeth Roy?
-- Modified on 10/1/2007 5:39:04 PM
but to tell the truth - the end of the movie was very thought provoking. As I say, I have no answer - and wish that I did.
Does that give you any additional cachet in the civvie world? As in "baby, I'm gonna make you a star"?
No - my trike already does that.
Can I send you cartons full of unspeakably bad story ideas, reams of vapid and inane additional dialogue, horrible one-liners, half-assed treatments, terminally bad original stories, and never-finished-for-excellent-reasons screenplays?
No. No Thank you. no, thats ok, no thanks. I SAID NO!!! DAMN IT!!!
BTW, do you know Joe Esterhausz?
You mean Joe Eszterhas? Met him once very briefly, he wouldn't know my name.
And can you hook me up with Elizabeth Roy?
Who?
To quote Ernest Hemingway in the novel, “Death in the Afternoon”; “a government that shoots upon their own people eventually will fall”.
The Kingdom the movie reminded me of a seminal event in Islamic terrorist activities. It was the attack of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The attack occurred on November 20, 1979, the first day of the Islamic 14th Century calender. Per Islamic theology this century would bring the return of the Prophet Muhammad. The Grand Mosque is the holiest of places for Islam. All believers of Muhammad pray in the direction of the Grand Mosque. Fallen followers are even buried with their heads toward the Grand Mosque.
Islamic fundamentalists attacked the Grand Mosque because they believed the House of Saud was corrupt and beholding to western and immoral anti-Godly beliefs.i.e. the supremacy of money, homosexuality etc. To prepare for the return of the Prophet Muhammad, the Al Saud dynasty had to be destroyed.
The House of Saud was shaken and responded with military force. Osama Bin Laden’s half-brother was reported to have been a member of this rebel group. Here is the irony, Bin Laden’s father’s construction company had built much of the modern facilities of the Grand Mosque and had the blueprints for much of the interior corridors.
The birth of Al Qa’ida is believed to have started with the armed seizure of the Grand Mosque. After the military response, Muslims around the world were angry and bitter with the House of the Saud and vowed an eternal Jihad. The Carter Administration preoccupied with the Iranian hostage crisis ignored and did not provide intelligence to investigate the Grand Mosque seizure. These Jihadists would have overtaken the House of Saud but then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Osama and his gang headed northeast.
What I am afraid of is, that we have tied our destiny with a corrupt and vile government i.e. the House of Saud.
-- Modified on 10/1/2007 8:31:12 PM
Your bottom line could not be more pointed.
The question is, what do we do now? IMHO, the byzantine foreign policy of the Bush administration seems to be the last worst thing.
Frankly, I think it's something we can't get to until we deal with a dozen more immediate issues, Iraq and indeed Washington DC being top of the list.
Whether ideology or economics drives a situation is rarely a clear question. And I'm not blaming anybody here, because I don't know anybody would have had a clearly better idea back in the middle of the last century or so. But it is something that we have to think of & deal with.
Eg, I do not fault Reagan in the least for supplying Afghan mujahideen with stingers. And even then we knew there were risks, but all life is balance, and I have to say I think we did the right thing.
But I will be damned if I can see any justification for Gulf 2. I have to think that even if we had elected Donna Fucking Brazile and Al Sharpton for HFMIC, we'd have still run bin Laden to ground. I think it took a World Class Incompetent to blow that one, and we searched far & wide to find him, "What-Me-Worry-We're-Doing-Heckuva-Job-Bush-2".
I dunno about quoting Hemingway, though. Washington didnt worry about the Whiskey Rebellion, and we seem to have done fine, to say nothing of the Civil War, ya know?
do you fault reagan/bush/rumsfeld for supplying saddam, thus providing counterbalance to iran?
"""Eg, I do not fault Reagan in the least for supplying Afghan mujahideen with stingers."""
and I'll be the 1st to say I should know more about it.
It was probably a tougher call, given that it looked like Saddam was more likely to be trouble than the Afghan muj were.
But I don't want to fault a CEO for making a tough call. It's the DUMB ones I want to score him on.
It's like being married - it's rarely right or wrong, it just IS.
I think that the problems are/were: (1) Bush is a dumb shit, a shill for smart people. Maybe more because of his personalized method than the fact that he can't speak English and doesn't read. (2) There's a fair chance he was fucking the dog on 9/11. I think the 9/11 commission probably understated the fuckups, because that's what commissions do. (3) I think they did the right thing in going into Afghanistan, and they did the wrong thing in laying off. (4) Bush's people are foreign policy morons. They don't understand the value of cooperation or pre-emption, and they don't understand the limits of military force. So they're inexperienced ideologues with little sense of personal responsibility (ie fucking draft dodgers for the most part, with the chutzpah to zing the likes of Murtha & Kerry about their personal records). (5) Bush got off on the wrong tangent entirely, using Osama as an excuse to invade Iraq. Now we are in an entirely predictable clusterfuck.
(6) Thinking that all of DC wants us to be permanently in the mideast is more of a conspiracy theory than I am ready for. But more and more it looks as though the lie was not about WMDs, the lie was that they were planning a more or less permanent presence in Iraq. Why? How else can they enforce the oil laws they fought so hard for? And if they can't make a buck there, they can always make a buck on defense contracts. THat's got to be one of the biggest scams of this war.
So the GOP is not expecting to "win" Iraq in any conventional sense. What they expect to do is use it as a way to control American politics and finance. What they forget (and this is only credible because you have to remember that these are the delusional Jesus people, and the "fear&greed" crony capitalists) is that they are riding a tiger. It would take a person with a little perspective to see that, and that's why they don't.
And of course, if you ride the tiger until you die, that's the best any of us will do anyway.
Does that answer your question?
Reagan essentially used Osama bin Laden and the Afghani Mujahideen, Saddam et al to battle communism. Did we create by fighting the Cold War on the battlefields in the Third World i.e. Angola, Afghanistan a greater enemy is a reasonable question?
It is also an unfair question. Unfair because it does not take into the reality, communism was a real threat and we won. Our country must never forget this victory.
Where I do find fault is in those Presidents that did not establish a foreign policy agenda for the aftermath of the Cold War. President Clinton and Prime Minister Blair were so concerned with Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti et al that they simply ignored the signs from the attack of the Grand Mosque as the birth of the jihadists.
Clinton failed to carry on the blueprint of the New World Order that President George H.W. Bush boldly outlined after Desert Storm. When Bush was in Somolia we were actually winning the hearts and minds of the people.
Clinton's amateurish CiC decision making began with Al Qa'ida in Mogadishu Somolia and he messed up and emboldened our enemy. This result was I believe led Al Qa'ida to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993 and further terrorists actions on US Embassies and of course 9-11.
Clinton after our Army soldiers were killed in Somolia should have initiated military action against Al Qa'ida in Africa and Afghanistan and wiped them out. Instead we ended up in Kosovo and I still don't know why.
-- Modified on 10/3/2007 12:12:05 AM
we were "fighting communism" since WW1, when we sent troops after the Bolsheviks. One ideologue scares another, whereas the man in the street sees it more practically, and the Treasury & War Depts see it more logistically.
The fact is, these things mix and interact. Normal people have to worry about logisitics and getting things done. Jesus people - ideologues driven by faith - rarely deal with those issues, and have little respect for the people who get things done.
We went into Vietnam thinking that we needed to stop international communism, only to run into the reality of jungles and massive indifference of the locals. Ho Chi Minh won because he had more credibility with the locals than we did, big surprise, and it may have been nothing more than his beard.
But it's not all about abstract principles. It's about the interaction of issues. Communists cheerfully fought each other over Vietnam and many other things, and nobody fights a disembodied principle. The obsession of ideologues with principles reflects the fact that these are mostly chickenhawks who never get their hands dirty, nor get close enough to people to see how dubious they are.
Our problem in Vietnam was focusing on communism, instead of recognizing the impossible task - and our fundamental disinterest - in helping the mass of people necessary to turn them against the locals. Back in 1950, the JCS told TRuman to stay the fuck off the Asian mainland, and he (and Johnson alike) should have heeded them.
It's perfectly understandable for us to be focused on Europe. That's where the money and productivity has been, and 2 world wars. Bosnia has been a tinderbox for centuries, and I think that was handled well.
But Somalia was another feel-good clusterfuck, trying to save people from themselves at the point of a gun.
The problem comes when you chase a few hornets, and instead stir up a beehive. It's hard to say when one black sheep construction contractor is going to cause a problem, or what it's worth to go after him. And when we start equating all the Arabic press to jihadists, what we've done is say, none of these people in that quarter of the globe deserve to live, which puts us in the camp of Hitler.
I have no particular desire to save or attack Africa or Arabia for any reason, and I don't think we should be getting ourselves into needless fights before we have some plan or idea how these are going to come down.
I find it totally incredible that the Bush administration would have no plan or thought in a losing 2 front war. Given our ability to move at will, I think the GOP is doing what they want, even if they don't get the advertised results.
I suspect they figure (not plan) on long term involvement in the mideast, ie, the precise foreign entanglements that Washington warned against; and I think they plan on that providing direction, cohesion and profit for their constituencies.
Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass whether some idiot wants to bow to Pat Robertson's fag-beating Jesus, or bow to Mecca 5X a day, as long as they do it peacefully and stay the fuck out of my way - I don't want no streets blocked, or doctors assassinated, or buildings blown up without permits. The problem is, they just can't stay off each others' throats, and so maybe what we need to do is create sports teams, and let them go at each other Saturday nights in the local stadiums with pitchforks, and no morphine. The problem smart people keep having is that they think because they CAN save some pathetic imbecile, they SHOULD - instead of just putting them down, you know?
goes the House of Saud leads the pack. Their depiction in the movie reminds one of a the Romanovs; oblivious of events and the political and historical significance of their actions.
In short, a highly repressive state.
but, as Jack0 correctly points out, we can't even begin to contemplate "what to do" unless and until we clean our own house. For while not quite as corrupt as Saud, it is gettin there.
And as far Gulf War 2.... While I am glad that Saddam is no longer able to torture his citizenry... I ask, "Were we justified? and why did we not have a plan for after the war?"
we have to worry about our plans before anybody else's torture. If we can't keep ourself squared away, we can't help anybody else.
I haven't seen the movie, I just don't like Jamie Fox. Maybe I'll like him better as a dramatic actor, as a comedian he sucks.
Jamie Fox is hot!
oh and people dying sux.