Alulim
Validated Poster
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Posts: 290
Location: New Albion
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 Posted: Mon Feb 18, 2008 10:48 am Post subject: Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter (Drs. Strangelove) |
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I just discovered these people. They are clearly significant to the bigger picture.
| Michael Dobbs, Washington Post Staff Writer wrote: |
For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized
Deputy Defense Secretary's Views on Free Iraq Considered Radical in Ways Good and Bad
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 7, 2003; Page A17
Four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz made a forceful case to President Bush for expanding the war on terrorism to include the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
At the time, many people in Washington, including some senior members of the Bush administration, thought that Wolfowitz was way out on a limb. A year and a half later, Wolfowitz's long-held dream of ridding the world of a leader he regards as one of the cruelest of modern-day despots and a direct threat to the security of the United States seems on the point of being realized.
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Wolfowitz's father, a brilliant mathematician whose family fled anti-Semitism in Poland and lost many relatives in the Holocaust, instilled in him a hatred of totalitarianism and a belief in the United States' power to do good. His later intellectual odyssey is about as close as one gets to a classic neo-conservative trajectory.
As a senior in high school in Upstate New York, Wolfowitz said he stuck out as a supporter of John F. Kennedy. He studied political philosophy at the University of Chicago under Albert Wohlstetter, the nuclear terror theorist who was an inspiration, along with Henry Kissinger, for the film "Dr. Strangelove." That led to work for Sen. Henry M. Jackson, a hawkish Washington state Democrat known as "Scoop" who believed in using U.S. power for humanitarian purposes.
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Connection between National Commission on Terrorism (Bremer Commission) and Attack on Pearl Harbour
www.fas.org/irp/threat/commission.html
Surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost. It includes gaps in intelligence, but also intelligence that, like a string of pearls too precious to wear, is too sensitive to give to those who need it. It includes the alarm that fails to work, but also the alarm that has gone off so often it has been disconnected. It includes the unalert watchman, but also the one who knows he'll be chewed out by his superior if he gets higher authority out of bed. It includes the contingencies that occur to no one, but also those that everyone assumes somebody else is taking care of. It includes straightforward procrastination, but also decisions protracted by internal disagreement. It includes, in addition, the inability of individual human beings to rise to the occasion until they are sure it is the occasion-- which is usually too late. (Unlike movies, real life provides no musical background to tip us off to the climax.) Finally, as at Pearl Harbor, surprise may include some measure of genuine novelty introduced by the enemy, and possibly some sheer bad luck.
The results, at Pearl Harbor, were sudden, concentrated, and dramatic. The failure, however, was cumulative, widespread, and rather drearily familiar. This is why surprise, when it happens to a government, cannot be described just in terms of startled people. Whether at Pearl Harbor or at the Berlin Wall, surprise is everything involved in a government's (or in an alliance's) failure to anticipate effectively.
Thomas C. Schelling,
Forward to Pearl Harbor; Warning and Decision,
by Roberta Wohlstetter
www.mujca.com/meyerreview.htm
Meyer goes beyond the above observations, cited earlier by Griffin and others, in calling attention to Donald Rumsfeld's bizarre Pearl-Harbor-propaganda campaign that had begun even before the Bush Administration took office. Rumsfeld spent 2000 and 2001 carrying around extra copies of Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, praising the book to the skies, and offering free copies to all and sundry. Wohlstetter's book, while it ostensibly supports the official myth that Pearl Harbor was a perfidious surprise attack, includes enough information to the contrary to enlighten the discerning reader to the unspeakable but implicitly acknowledged truth: The Roosevelt Administration provoked the attacks, knew they were coming, and left thousands of sailors in harm's way as an offering to the gods of war. Wohlstetter's book is a perfect illustration of neocon doublespeak: Tell a vivid, simplistic, emotionally-charged lie to the masses (“Perfidious surprise attack! Heroic purple-fury response!”) yet include as a subtle subtext the unspeakable truth that only the elite are smart enough to discern and strong enough to handle: “Roosevelt sacrificed thousands of American lives to the greater good of getting the US into the war.”
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"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." ~ Thomas Jefferson
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." ~ Pennsylvania Historical Review (1759) |
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