Who is this Crazy Man on WJ ...this a.m. Thomas P.M. Barnett,raving about our Globalized Military!

[KoKo]

Saying that our Military is America's Gross Domestic Product and it's reasonable to ask American's to spend 2 to 3% or our budget spreading our troops around the world to work to keep our Globalization safe and our interest safe?

He's a Pentagon Analyist...and advocating America to be like Rome sending our troops to occupy under the guise of "friendly training" of foreign troops. He showed photo's of our our military would live in "boxcars" that are really "lovely apartments" while we occupy Africa and other places of interest.

He looks as crazy as he sounds. Is THIS our NEW POLICY?

He's got an article with his ravings in the July issue of "Esquire" magazine.

[EFerrari]

1. He's rationalizing our recolonializing Africa!

It's going to be crawling with Al Qaida so we're beating them to a presence. :crazy:

[snappyturtle]

9. We're listening....and when he mentions presence I keep thinking

pre-emption! Seems to fit.

[EFerrari]

10. He called it "Iraq gone right." Couldn't be balder, could it. n/t

[Gabi Hayes]

2. great caller on right now, calling him on this BS, with SPECIFICS. also criticizing

Brian Lamb for allowing the likes of Frank Gaffney on Q and A to spew his filthy lies without refutation

[KoKo]

4. Thanks....I turned him off before that caller I couldn't listen anymore

If he's tied to Frank Gaffney...then I understand why he's crazy and why Brian had him on to spout his ravings. When are these people going to be brought down for corruption. Bad enough we still have the neocons involved in our foreign policy after their failures and now we have this other crazy out there spewing more insanity.

[EFerrari]

5. Did you hear him say "we'll get our oil even if the place is on fire"?

"That oil is going to flow." :scared:

[Gabi Hayes]

7. missed that.....been typing.

said Barnett: "our focus in the Middle East should NOT be democracy,'' but to allow the potentates, basically, do what they're doing now, and let things 'evolve' naturally

just comes right out and says it, deSPITE his masters' averral that the REASON we're over there is to SPREAD democracy

total globalist fascist

[OregonBlue]

3. He was asked who paid for his trip. He hesitated and then said Esquire did but...he has a close

working relationship with the U.S. military blah, blah, blah. My bet is we taxpayers did and Esquire kicked in some portion. Wonder how I would find out?

[Gabi Hayes]

6. he wrote an article for Esquire, but worked at/taught (?) at one of the

military war colleges

he's really cracked

talking about 'establishing stability' in Africa

talking about globalizing the economy in Africa, including China/India, withOUT mentioning that the natural resources in Africa belong to the AFRICANS

amazing

bet he'd love to get his hands on Chavez' resources, but he and the other South American leaders aren't playing that anymore, are they?

[EFerrari]

8. Are we sure this isn't Tori Clarke in drag? He sounds just like her. nt

[OregonBlue]

26. Thanks. I still wonder who actually paid for the trip because if it wa all Esquire,

why did he hem and haw and why did he bring up the his relationship with the military at that time. He was definitely surprised that he was asked the question.

I just wondered where I could find out who really paid. Maybe write to Esquire and ask them just exactly what the funding arrangement was.

[Gabi Hayes]

11. DIG IT! He's from the "give me that, or I'm going over there!" school

A Post-Modern Nimrod
by Joseph R. Stromberg

“The peasants of the Old World tell a remarkably uniform tale of a mad hunter from the North and East who claimed to rule the world in the insane conviction that he had conquered God with his arrow. Such… was the archaic and mysterious Nimrod, the mighty hunter of the steppes, who shot an arrow into the sky… and when a shower of blood ensued believed he had conquered God and won for himself the universal kingship. The story is based on a genuine hunting ritual of great antiquity, but the literary reports all chill with horror at the thought of a man who first turned his arrows from the hunting of beasts to become ‘a hunter of men,’ who founded the first great state, invented organized warfare, and ‘made all people rebellious against God.’” <1>

Ancient literati may have quailed at the Nimrodian program, but contemporary spokesmen for power are made of sterner stuff. Thomas P. M. Barnett of the U.S. Naval War College is one such: a sort of Midwestern Oswald Spengler, keen to throw Destiny’s dice. Barnett, whose program is revealed in his book, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002), was trained by only the best Cold War liberals at Harvard, the school that gave us napalm. He has been called a George F. Kennan for the new century. He seems more a reduced James Burnham for a very brief century.

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Barnett seems to have a Self that is universal. It expresses the deepest needs and wants of the very cosmos. Literary critic Quentin Anderson notes, in passing, that Emerson may have “simply carried on the activity of being or becoming ‘Emerson’….” <2> In reading Thomas Barnett, one gets at times the impression that his work is all about the activity of being or becoming Barnett.

Barnett is all things to all people. Given competing visions, he can affirm them all, as long as they are imperial and grand. He is bipartisan and non-sectarian. He believes that once his sheer clarity and strategic genius hit home, all Presidents and administrations of whatever party will carry out his program forevermore.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/stromberg/stromberg66.html

[KoKo]

14. Thanks for that info about Barnett, Gabi.... interesting...

Ancient literati may have quailed at the Nimrodian program, but contemporary spokesmen for power are made of sterner stuff. Thomas P. M. Barnett of the U.S. Naval War College is one such: a sort of Midwestern Oswald Spengler, keen to throw Destiny’s dice. Barnett, whose program is revealed in his book, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002), was trained by only the best Cold War liberals at Harvard, the school that gave us napalm. He has been called a George F. Kennan for the new century. He seems more a reduced James Burnham for a very brief century.

[Gabi Hayes]

17. sure...I remember seeing him do a powerpoint, IIRC, presentation on CSPAN

awhile back

I remember thinking....this guy is comPLETELY megalomaniacal.

I'm in the midst of reading the Stromberg article, and found some other things, including this Karen Kwiatkowski review of the book that put him on the "map". Less far ranging than the first piece, but easier to digest.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/kwiatkowski.php?articleid=2762

New Map, Same Bad Destinations
A Review of The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century by Thomas P.M. Barnett
by Karen Kwiatkowski

Dr. Thomas Barnett, Harvard trained political scientist and self-described Pentagon futurist, has a bone to pick with the Bush administration. America's invasion of Iraq was a great achievement, but the President hasn't yet shared with Americans why we are staying there, for … well, forever. Barnett's latest book, The Pentagon's New Map, cheerfully explains that there is no exit strategy for Iraq or Afghanistan. He writes, "We are never leaving the Gap and we are never 'bringing the boys home.' There is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking the Gap … and we better stop kidding ourselves about 'exit strategies.'"

Barnett's view is this: The world is divided into a culturally and economically connected Core and a disconnected Non-Integrating Gap. It needs a post Cold War "rule-set reset" to ensure that the disconnected ones – states and individuals – are not excluded from the game. The security of the international system is the new American responsibility. We must organize and act in a way to combat violence originating, for the most part, from individuals and groups operating from the disconnected Gap. He believes the good news of our rule-set should be actively shared, and that this sharing is natural, good, moral and non-imperialistic. Barnett is a self-described optimist who fully intends to leave behind a far safer and better world for his children and mine.

Using market, computing and advertising idiom, Barnett explains that there are two key roles that United States must play in the 21st century – that of rule-setting Leviathan and that of System Administrator. His book lays out how the Department of Defense must bifurcate accordingly into two robust capabilities: a killer app that is speedy, stealthy, powerful, young, male, deadly and used overseas only, and its mild mannered opposite, a policing-oriented force that uses military and civilian law, works at home and abroad and is not bound by posse comitatus restrictions. The Leviathan force and the System Administrator force are the main ways of getting America's greatest export commodity – security – out to the "customer."

As in any other free trade, we are as benefited by the exchange as is our "customer." Barnett explains, "This exporting of security is, in large part, nothing more than a by-product of the U.S. military's continuous worldwide operations. We are the only military in the history of the world to possess a planet-spanning command scheme." Barnett's book explains how this capability can and should be used to create a global future "worth creating."

Reading this book took a tremendous amount of fortitude on my part. The staff officer and strategy analyst in me enjoyed the strategic debate, reminisces about PowerPoint and the tribulations of a being a mid-level apparatchik-cum-smartass, and reading about Pentagon personalities. But the Burke-loving libertarian in me was increasingly gripped by a strange combination of amazement and terror. Barnett mustn't take this personally; I feel the same way when I read Sam Huntington.

[KoKo]

24. Oh that's the one.....I remember that years ago on C-Span he had charts and

went on for about three hours about remaking the world map...Pentagon.... I didn't connect that guy with the one this a.m. although the name seemed familiar. Amazing I thought that whole presentation was crazy but I remember watching it in horror...then forgot about it. Sheesh...HE'S BACK!

[iamahaingttta]

12. Thomas P.M. Barnett had some great ideas...

...that don't make much sense anymore, in the post 9/11 Bush era world.
His thing is the idea of "network-centric warfare."
He believes, in opposition to the neo-CONs that American power can be projected as a force of good in the world. The neo-CONs just believe in power.

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Barnett

[Gabi Hayes]

13. did you see the Stromberg article? he said it much better than I can, so I'll leave it to him.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/stromberg/stromberg66.html

[iamahaingttta]

20. Yeah, I just finished that.

Looks like he's drunk the Kool-Aid.

[KharmaTrain]

15. Force Of Good = Oxymoron

This dude seems to have one foot in post 9/11 and one in the Cold War. Yes, he makes a lot of sense about the cultural divisions in that area and how much of the political mess in Africa was imposed by "colonial rule", but then he disconnects that, while the U.S. wasn't a "colonial power", it's culture is tied to those who were to occupiers and that there's precious little education in this country as to dealing with that part of the world as not a part of some global chessboard.

He's replaced the Soviet Union with China as being the economic and political competitor in the region and uses Al Queda as a legitmacy for our troops to be based in the horn of Africa and to dabble in the Somali and Eithiopian Civil Wars.

I didn't hear him mention Darfur or Sudan at all. Also, how he dismissed oil as being a keystone of our government's policy in dealing with Africa and even said "there's little to offer here"...forgetting about other precious metals and other natural resources (like Chrome)...he truly has a narrow view of what's going on there.

[KoKo]

16. Barnett seems to believe one says the power is for good but he wants troops

placed in areas that have natural resources that Globalized America needs to use. So it's just a ploy to have us occupy and grab what we want under the "guise" of friendly occupation.

Sheesh...it's what we've been doing for awhile...in many places (while death squads carry out our "true" policy).. Think what we did in South America...:-(

[The2ndWheel]

18. You should see his Power Point presentation

I've seen it twice on C-SPAN.

Say what we will, but this is how globalization works. It cannot work without a global military force. It cannot work if there is too much diversity.

[sinkingfeeling]

19. Hate to break it to you, but the USA has been acting like an empire for the past

40 years. We have 'military' bases in over 130 countries and we pay through the nose for this show of 'might'. We are the most militaristic country in the world.

[Gabi Hayes]

21. ya think? one of the funniest moments was when he described most of the

700+ bases we have worldwide as mostly automated teller machines, as compared to banks, because they're so "tiny!"

seriously

he took pains to downplay both the size of our footprint in Africa, and the reason for our being there: resource-rich lands, ripe for the taking.

he's as frightening a person I've encountered in some time, and that's saying something, considering the menagerie hatched over the last six and a half years

[mwb970]

22. Why do people watch this show in the first place?

I never watch it, but from reading the posts on DU I gather that it is a forum for rightwing wackos somewhat akin to Fox Noise.

Do people watch this show mostly to come and complain about it on DU, or is it genuinely informative in some way?

[snappyturtle]

25. I watch because it's interesting to hear viewpoints from different

parts of the country.....the DEMS get through too and some of them are really good. I do think there is an abundance of rw pundits, however, their ridulous nature is brought out when they open their mouths....I've been surprised lately by the number of callers on the repuke line who are audibly upset with their party...which is always good to hear.

[Barking Spider]

23. See his 24 minute presentation at TED here...

The Pentagon's new map for war and peace.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/33

Very interesting.