Mr Mephisto, I would like to know why you still take the opinions of Americans seriously enough to justify engaging us in this forum. After "electing" in recent times, presidential tickets that relegated us to live under 20 years of the "leadership" of Reagan, Quayle, and finally, Bush, why the "God help us", in your thread title?
A signifigant number of us our proud of our choices, and most of the rest of us seem accepting enough of these choices. You witnessed the media reaction to the homage, reverence, tribute, and praise, paid to mediocrity here, one year ago during the week of "all Reagan, all of the time", on the occasion of his passing.
Outside of our cultural influence on the rest of the world, is there any other incentive that draws you to us, other than a need to keep tabs on our potential to use our military power in an increasingly ill conceived or reckless manner? Your "God help us" reaction to "more Bush", IMO, should be to this:
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...051400071.html "Back up" link: http://www.lookingglassnews.org/view...hp?storyid=532
Not Just A Last Resort?
A Global Strike Plan, With a Nuclear Option
By William Arkin
Sunday, May 15, 2005; Page B01
Early last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved a top secret "Interim Global Strike Alert Order" directing the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.
Two months later, Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, told a reporter that his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had changed its way of operating so that it could be ready to carry out such missions. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview with the Shreveport (La.) Times. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson said his forces were the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and could execute an attack "in half a day or less."
In the secret world of military planning, global strike has become the term of art to describe a specific preemptive attack. When military officials refer to global strike, they stress its conventional elements. Surprisingly, however, global strike also includes a nuclear option, which runs counter to traditional U.S. notions about the defensive role of nuclear weapons.
The official U.S. position on the use of nuclear weapons has not changed. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has taken steps to de-emphasize the importance of its nuclear arsenal. The Bush administration has said it remains committed to reducing our nuclear stockpile while keeping a credible deterrent against other nuclear powers. Administration and military officials have stressed this continuity in testimony over the past several years before various congressional committees.
But a confluence of events, beginning with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the president's forthright commitment to the idea of preemptive action to prevent future attacks, has set in motion a process that has led to a fundamental change in how the U.S. military might respond to certain possible threats. Understanding how we got to this point, and what it might mean for U.S. policy, is particularly important now -- with the renewed focus last week on Iran's nuclear intentions and on speculation that North Korea is ready to conduct its first test of a nuclear weapon.
Global strike has become one of the core missions for the Omaha-based Strategic Command, or Stratcom. Once, Stratcom oversaw only the nation's nuclear forces; now it has responsibility for overseeing a global strike plan with both conventional and nuclear options. President Bush spelled out the definition of "full-spectrum" global strike in a January 2003 classified directive, describing it as "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives."
<h4>This blurring of the nuclear/conventional line, wittingly or unwittingly, could heighten the risk that the nuclear option will be used.</h4> Exhibit A may be the Stratcom contingency plan for dealing with "imminent" threats from countries such as North Korea or Iran, formally known as CONPLAN 8022-02.........
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Quote:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects...?itemNo=580533 Link With Highlights: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache...r+brakes&hl=en
Last update - 11:32 26/05/2005
The U.S. removes the nuclear brakes
By Reuven Pedatzur
Under the cloak of secrecy imparted by use of military code names, the American administration has been taking a big - and dangerous - step that will lead to the transformation of the nuclear bomb into a legitimate weapon for waging war.
Ever since the terror attack of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has gradually done away with all the nuclear brakes that characterized American policy during the Cold War. No longer are nuclear bombs considered "the weapon of last resort." No longer is the nuclear bomb the ultimate means of deterrence against nuclear powers, which the United States would never be the first to employ.
In the era of a single, ruthless superpower, whose leadership intends to shape the world according to its own forceful world view, nuclear weapons have become a attractive instrument for waging wars, even against enemies that do not possess nuclear arms.
Remember the code name "CONPLAN 8022." Last week, the Washington Post reported that this unintelligible nickname masks a military program whose implementation could drag the world into nuclear war..........
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It is advisable to keep an eye on us, Mr Mephisto. Our lack of judgment exhibited by who we choose to lead us, and the choices that these "leaders" have made and are making, as well as the caliber of their public "performances", insinuates that the people who prevail at the voting booth or at the Supreme Court, the ones trotted out to speak to the TV cameras, cannot possibly be the decision makers. The people that make the decisions apparently are largely unseen, and it matters little who we vote for, if we keep the staus quo of our two party system and a press that provides the "in depth" coverage of examples like "CONPLAN 8022"!