The pipeline? Really?
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Apparently it is easier to conquer Pipelinistan than to make peace with Iran, which is the alternative route.
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Itâs a good thing Snowden didnât ask for your advice before joining the NSA. Where would we be today if Snowden never existed? Where will we be in the future if the next Snowden also never exists thanks to advice like this?
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Jeez, just came to say that was well said. But some of you in this thread have issues and if you donât think I am refering to you, I probably am.
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[quote=âanansi133, post:17, topic:70595â]
That sounds a lot like Gandhiâs advice to the Jews in WW2.
[/quote]But it also sounds like Ghandiâs advice to the Indians.
I think that blaming the war on desires for a pipeline is giving them way too much credit. At the time, it was all more immediate and less long range. It was get Halliburton in there so Dick Cheney can make as much money as possible as fast as possible.
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Canât we have both? 
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The Indians were up against a bankrupt, exhausted British Empire. But also, and very significant, many important British people were very pro-Indian. Especially British officers in the Indian Army, who had a very high opinion of their troops. The British Government was never going to plan to exterminate Indians en masse. In fact, possibly the British politician with the worst attitude to India was Churchill.
India was the âJewel in the Imperial crownâ, the prime example of how British administrative skills turned an anarchic collection of warring states into a functioning country. [at least, this is the narrative of the Imperialists - the reality was somewhat different.] Gandhi knew the British. He just had no conception whatever of the Germans. He really did not understand for one moment that they would not quickly tire of killing people.
[edit - in case albill reads this and complains I am going off topic, the relevance is this: that it is easy to give advice based on the assumption that other people share your cultural values. But they may not. We have no idea whether the management of the NSA is âBritishâ or âNaziâ in its approach to dissent. I suspect the latter, but I canât of course prove it.]
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A lot of this seems to suggest that we want a better NSA, rather than no NSA (or at least one that is greatly reduced in scope). Iâm not really sure how good people can improve the agency other than by sabotaging it.
As to your statement about moral compasses, I donât want to be indoctrinated with the armyâs moral compass and drilled with the idea of duty, honour, and loyalty to the military. I have those ideals of duty, honour, and loyalty and a moral compass myself, which is part of the reason Iâd resist this indoctrination. A moral compass trained to the ideals of the most militarised country in the world is not a good thing.
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Hitler was only able to take over Germany because it, at the time, was the country in the world where the military most closely controlled everything, including politics. The worry with the US is how militarised thinking is increasingly affecting politics, which is somewhat different.
Hitler, in fact, was able to take over because he had a decapitation strategy - German military thinking was so stratified that once he was at the top of the system it was unthinkable for those below not to obey him (plus a street army of 100 000 or so helped.)
The main parallel with the US therefore is the potential for street armies to develop from the heavily armed Tea Partiers and the like. I am far more worried about Trump or Cruz harnessing that sort of power than I am about people indoctrinated to be loyal to the US military, because being at the apex of the military still does not control the US.
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this is strange, as the German army was much reduced after the 1st WW. they had some secret projects for the forbidden tanks and airplanes, but I doubt that âcontrolling everythingâ is true before Hitlerâs coming into power
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Actually, Haliburton wanted to build a natural gas pipeline across Afghanistan. Do you think we actually cared about what the Taliban did to women there?
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Those two things are connected.
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Yes, geopolitically speaking they are. I canât pin the war on the pipeline alone, though. Thatâs my point. It was one part of a perhaps larger strategy, but the lionâs share was to make as much money as possible as fast as possible, not to speculate on long-term projects. The speculation was there, but it took a very back seat to the immediate opportunities available in the form of what eventually became trillions spilling from the US Treasury to fund the war.
And your good point about womenâs rights in Afghanistan⊠it was a convenience that presented itself, just as with ISIS/ISIL/Daesh: an easy way to make the other side a poster boy for evil. True that they are, but it was/is not the actual true reason for going to war.
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I assume that you are German. I think you are possibly confusing matĂ©riel and manpower with the military hierarchy and its close links to the Prussian aristocracy. Iâm not going to try to teach you to suck eggs, but I have to say that I have consulted German sources.
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if you mean Seecktâs success in undermining the political influence on the army I still disagree: the army was potent but did not control everything
your politeness and style is as always exceptional
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