[Editor’s note:  Two of our more frequent contributors recently engaged in some e-mail ping-pong, and they thought you might enjoy their exchange.  Loggie is a retired logistician, now consulting. Max grew up in Montreal, Canada, and was exposed to the French Quebec separatist movement and the terrorist FLQ activity of the early 1970s. This exposure at an early age gave him an innate sense and appreciation of 4th generation warfare. He is now a broadcast television systems electronics engineering consultant who lives alternately in Toronto, Canada and Vermont USA.]

Max:

In a speech linked on DNI, by Sven, by Ret. US Army Col. Andrew Bachavich, fielding a question at the end, is asked about the MICC and the role it plays in the current tribulation.

There he stressed his own opinion that one needs to look past the MICC, as a simplistic and convenient excuse for everything that’s perceptibly going poorly, overspending, procurement issues and waste, seemingly misguided protracted misadventures, and what many see as the MICC co-opted military expansionist cycle.

Loggie responds:

Good point. Your bottom line hits it: Americans believe they have a right to rule the world.

Not only can’t they do it, but they let the radicals throw in unAmerican values which actually alienate the rest, including some of us.

I do not discount the greed and making the expensive hammer aspect of support for the war on an idea called “terror.” Perpetual war is good for war profiteers. And they handle nearly a half trillion a year between the fraud and in buying defective new stuff that give the profitable do-overs to make it work.

Max continues:

My own interpretation is that he (Bachavich) feels that the MICC is but a symptomatic manifestation (albeit gigantic) of a deeper issue with American society at large.

Loggie:

I agree, the MIWC plays to a lot of unique American psyches. To say nothing about the irrational fear of a replay of Pearl Harbor, if the US don’t enrich the MICC. Unfortunately, there is huge disinformation in the MICC. The generals say that every weapon is superior while GAO and the testers find almost all

of it highly questionable and over priced.

Max continues:

In the Moyers / PBS interview, Col. Bachavich suggests that Americans need to reassess their priorities, expectations, values, reliances, their lifestyle habits, and return to the promise laid out in the preamble to the US Constitution.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08152008/profile.html

Loggie responds:

Utterly correct. Every American including those in the Beltway need to re-read it too.

Max:

Until the USA comes to grips with that (probably never) nothing will change, or/until it collapses under it’s own weight in insolvency. ( things that can’t go on forever, don’t. )* Herbert Stein

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Herbert_Stein

*As quoted by Chalmers Johnson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=VPr_T7btVgA& feature=related

I saw little evidence of that perception on the current blog, on the contrary, it was suggested by several that Americans should ‘protest’ or simply talk to each other about the current regime, and that somehow at the grass roots level, that might resolve the issue.

Loggie responds:

Protest won’t work!!! Protesters in 2009 like in 1968 will be looked at as if they were outside the safe serf system. That they make waves is a threat to status quo and the class distinctions.

Max continues:

I see that didn’t work in the 1960s, with far more people mobilized and far more concerted, then later and out of a sense of sheer frustration, even violent protest, a few even died.

As evidence that today we are right back were we were, and arguably worse off, while potentially far more at risk overall.

I feel all this provides fodder for further internal division, ever weakening coherence, not to mention ammunition for an internalized 4GW threat on the horizon, secessionists.

http://www.angelfire.com/nv/ micronations/ usa.html

Loggie:

Secessionists are an interesting group, looked on by the main stream FOX News etc, as an odd group as ineffective and impudent as the anti MIWC/MICC crowd who are so far out, as to be completely ignored.

Current Seeseches (as the Army of Tennessee Union volunteers called the troops the Eastern solders called Johhnies or Johnnie Rebs) are a fringe group, and will be marginalized as the anti MIWC will get shelved.

I’ve head someone say that there can be no cuts in the MIWC because it would cost too many jobs (read votes), even though the jobs are wasted and the money and people need to go elsewhere, like making wind turbines or such.

Max sums up:

It’s all rather tiresome, some say even adolescent in mentality, if not for the costs, even ridiculous.

My visceral reaction is to say that Americans have made their own beds, time after time, after time, and so should therefore take responsibility for these decisions lie there, and shut up !

Loggie concludes:

Okay, but that doesn’t mean that those of us who see it differently, should have to go down the same way !

That maybe a true essence of freedom.

Max:

I can see that, and I hope that the USA can return to that basis, of the most essential of freedoms, to simply choose right from wrong.

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