On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:08:18 -0700, eatfastnoodle
wrote:



Â* Â* Â* Â* Look at their defense agreements, military history and joint
defense Â*
programs, to include that nice new port the Peoples Liberation
Army-Navy's Â*
building there. China and Pakistan are closer to each other than the US
Â*
and Germany was in the Cold War. And if you look closely at that, what
you Â*
see is that they're defacto members of SCO. And any professional order
of Â*
battle in that coalition will include Pakistan in China's column, not
ours.

That's because Chinese has been on their side ever since the Pakistani
independence, both countries has undergone major political and
economic changes ever since. Yet no matter who is in charge in
Pakistan, generals, politicians, good guy, bad guy, crooks, whatever,
China always stands with Pakistan in their fight with India. Their
relation is fundamentally in line with their strategic interests.
That's why it's so strong. As for the US, I guess everybody agrees
that in the eyes of US government, Pakistan is nothing more than a
convenient ally at best, a tool I would say. As for average joes, the
image of Pakistan isn't that much better than Taliban.

Yup, that isn't gonna change ever since the Chinese provided weapons
after the West embargoed them back in the 60's.




One change of approach I would like to say is for the US to give up on
its obsession to stick its noses into other people's business. US used
to be far better a friend during the cold war when Soviet Union used
to send tanks into any of its ally who dared to think about leaving
the Warsaw pact, France kicked American troops out and opened pursued
its own path, US accepted it and worked with France still. Seriously,
the kind of "Manifest Destiny" attitude ****es off everybody.

Yup. I think that they do it out of habit. For the most part, not a lot
of thought goes into our foreign policy at the Government level. Mostly
it's farmed out to think tanks and Beltway Bandits and a lot of those are
financed by various tax exempt foundations that front for various moneyed
interests.

Your typical politician tends to be ignorant of everything except
fundraising and media relations. He's overdependant on staff and the staff
is overdependant on whomever takes them to lunch and gives them some piece
of research that they're not all that competent to make assessments of.


I'm not an expert on the nitty-gritty details, but please elect
somebody who knows what he's doing and who has at least a little
common sense. WMD issue aside, whether or not the military is
"winning" in Iraq now aside, anybody who has common sense would hope
for the best but plan for the worst even though you are 100% sure the
best case scenario would happen because any sane people would know
that there isn't 100% sure thing. instead, this administration based
its plan on the assumption that US soldiers would be welcomed as
liberators. That's beyond dumb.

You'll never see it here. Our system selects for the lowest common
denominator of politician and thus the lowest common denominator is what
we get. Anybody with real principles or any kind of actual knowledge will
get filtered out before he can run for city council, let alone Congress or
the Senate. Structurally, this country is totally incapable of producing
somebody like Winston Churchill.

And it gets worse. Most government policy is an outsourced product. That
worked sort of, in the 50's because the universities were actually
producing diciplined intellectuals who could apply a little skepticism and
critically assess information. We're no longer able to produce guys like
James Schlesinger anymore, because our university systems have lost the
ability to do that. We ceded the college campuses to the radical left in
the 60's and 70's and now, as far as producing the technicians who
actually can create viable policy and administer it goes, they can't. They
do a remarkably good job of producing fair copies of the New Soviet Man
though. My youngest is in college now, and she's planning on a career as
an attorney. When I got a look at what they're demanding that she take as
core curriculium, I was appalled. A college education these days have
costs ranging from five to six significant digits and looking at what
they're being asked to pay for, I can tell you that a modern university
education in this country is a fraud and things are deteriorating from
there. Critical thinking skills are out and courses based on the most
schizoid ideology I've ever seen, predominate.

The end result is that the formation of policy is in the hands of an
increasingly incompetent group of people. And the end result of that will
be that the policies in question will be schizoid, self contradictory, and
in general, destructive to the continued maintenance of our national
security.

My guess is that the future is going to be replete with ever more
instances of us shooting ourselves in the ass. And anybody who has to
determine what their relationship is to our government needs to take that
into account. I'm an American. I've lived here my entire life except for
some travel as a member of the military. And I can't predict what our
policy establishment or our politicians will do, simply because they're
too ignorant to come up with a consistant policy on anything. You have
some individuals who are competent, but you'll find that Gresham's Law
applies to government as much as it does anything else-- the bad will
drive out the good and we're seeing that here.

So, if anybody's planning on doing anything to preserve Post Renaissance
Western Civilization in the world, they can expect to do it in spite of
Washington at least as often as they do because of it.

--
"Implications leading to ramifications leading to shenanigans"-- Admiral
Elmo Zumwalt, USN.