Conspiranoia

The broad thesis that conspiracies do exist is inarguable, though frankly I thought you made the point perfectly well. But can we at least say that comparing 9/11 to a proposed staged attack on a naval ship (let alone to the Gulf of Tonkin, in which no attack took place at all) is not “dead on”? Somehow I think the difference between shooting up a boat (and presumably inflicting few or no casualties) on the one hand and murdering more than 2000 citizens while inflicting tens of billions of dollars in property damage on the other is a difference not of degree, but of kind.

And German paratrooper boots are the Mercedes of army surplus boot, even if you can only get them used. The recent announcement that Germany is going to end compulsorary national service was a sad day for coddled feets everywhere.

Emm… that’s Bundeswehr. The Wehrmacht left off doing business quite some time ago (and in any event wore feldgrau).

I’m not sure where you get the idea that the military-industrial complex is a conspiracy. It is more of a phenomenon than a conspiracy, and as others have noted it is actually better refered to as the military-industrial-congressional complex. The number of prime contractors may be fairly small, but there are many sub-contractors that are scattered throughout many congressional districts.

A nice whimsy though — it brings to mind the story of Byron the Bulb. I was a bit surprised by the difference in magnitude between the US espionage budget ($30B) and weapons contracts ($hundreds of M) — that suggests that you are correct in thinking the m/i complex is not large enough to influence the conspirators at Langley.

I am prey to the powerful delusion that if a store has a great deal of a particular item in stock it is because that item is a big seller and they have attempted to the best of their ability to get as much of the item as they assume will meet their demands.

Alas.

If you extrapolate from the army surplus clerk in the movie “Falling Down”, the abundance of German surplus shirts can be explained by the fact that all army surplus clerks are neonazis.

I never dreamt there’d come a day when a CT poster would cite favourably a right-wing commentator at whom I personally feel strong antipathy towards. Is it just because you agree with him in this sole case, or is CT – where softies like Lileks and Reynolds are depicted as red sharp-tailed fork-carriers – undergoing one of those once-in-a-generation political transformations?

People have commented on how cheap American politicans are to buy. A ten-billion dollar windfall can sometimes be bought with a few carefully-placed donations totalling well less than a million. These donations are speculative and multi-purpose (munitions, oil, space program, we got it) and don’t have a sure payoff (i.e. these conspiracies, if you want to call them that, are not closely coordinated and rigidly mechanical, but more opportunistic and adventurist.)

There’s a second multiplier too — just as political donations can be multiplied several thousand fold into of military spending, a few billion dollars worth of well-placed munitions can have economic and other effects of much greater scope than a measly few bil. It can add up to real money when the world economy collapses various nations pass out of existence, battleground nations experience sudden demographic transformatins, etc.

I suppose to get that, though, you also have to have a sincere war party which is not entirely crass and venal but just wants the death and creative destruction for its own sake, without any ulterior motive.

Steve- kind of picking a nit, but

“…the Gulf of Tonkin, in which no attack took place at all…”

is not quite accurate- there *was* an attack on 2 aug. ’64 against the Maddox- it was the report of an attack on 4 aug against the C. Turner Joy that was inaccurate. IIRRC correctly the captain of the ship interpreted radar returns as showing an attack, and commenced firing. A few hours later, he concluded he had misinterpreted what he saw, and there had not been an attack. Again IIRC correctly, the ships were both supporting SV commando raids against the north, and could have been considered “fair game”

Regardless, the events *were* lied about to gin up support for the GT resolution.

Regarding the article itself, the author writes :
“With similar mystic gnosis, Donald Rumsfeld has alleged that the failure to find ‘weapons of mass distraction’, as Tony Blair likes to call them, shows that they once existed but were destroyed.”

I point to Dr. Kay’s statements in today’s New York Times-

“I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990’s. Somewhere in the mid-1990’s, the large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated.”

sounds like they in fact did once exist, and in were, in fact, destroyed.