17-May-10 News -- Markets open Monday amid high tension

[Oakwood]

JOHN:

I've also said, over and over and over, that if Al Gore had been
President after 9/11, then we would have had exactly the same war in
Iraq. This has nothing to do with ideology.

Are you kidding? This has everything to do with ideology. Presumably you're saying that because Gore and Bush were both baby boomers, they would have reacted the same way to the same crisis. But that totally ignores their character and personal ideologies. JR listed many of the reasons that Bush was drawn to war--reasons that would not have been present if Gore was president. Moreover, remember what Bush said? Something like, "I'm gonna git Saddem, He tried to kill my Daddy." That was no joke, there was some deep psychological meaning to that for him. He was going to finish the job he felt his Daddy didn't do well enough. If you saw the movie W, it's pretty clear that George W. had a real problem living up to his father's expectations, and he wanted to make his mark in the world. The problem you have is that you are so taken with GD that you fail to understand that sometimes other dynamics matter, like character, personal motivations, and personal ideology. Like many theorists you've become so enamored with your theory, you think you've discovered a Holy Grail that explains everything. Open your mind to some of the criticism.

[thomasglee]

The problem you have is that you are so taken with GD that you fail to understand that sometimes other dynamics matter, like character, personal motivations, and personal ideology. Like many theorists you've become so enamored with your theory, you think you've discovered a Holy Grail that explains everything. Open your mind to some of the criticism.

YOUR roblem is that you're so tied up in your own ideology, you can't or won't take the time to try and understand the Generational Dynamics that are outlined here.

[Oakwood]

Go ahead, accuse me of ideological bias. But you still did not respond to the substance of my argument or the excellent commentary made by JR detailing Bush's unique motivations for going to war. I suspect you think that going to war with Iraq (the second time) was a good idea. Can you confirm that for us? And if you agree with that, can you explain why you think it was a good idea? Do you feel it made our country safer?

[xakzen]

Go ahead, accuse me of ideological bias. But you still did not respond to the substance of my argument or the excellent commentary made by JR detailing Bush's unique motivations for going to war. I suspect you think that going to war with Iraq (the second time) was a good idea. Can you confirm that for us? And if you agree with that, can you explain why you think it was a good idea? Do you feel it made our country safer?

My take on this is that GD is saying that the mood of the country was such that war was possible maybe even inevitable. That the Bush admin directed that at Iraq for their own reasons is probable. Remember the Russians, the French and even UN officials were making a lot of money by playing the sanctions game with Saddam with the Iraqi people paying the price. Those sanction profiteers had to support the view that WMD were being actively developed in order to continued their profits. Bush just called their bluff. There is no question that the aftermath of the war was badly mismanaged. It is also certain that the Iraqi people are better off now than under Saddam. History will tell whether it was ultimately successful. Personally I have my own misgivings about this experiment in Democracy as it sounds too Wilsonian. It is also clear it has been costly to this country and all the "Blood for Oil" fanatics here have prevented the Iraqi gov from paying for their own liberation. Still we have much bigger problems now to be still stuck on the blame Bush bandwagon. We are spending more money in a month than a year of war supplementals.

[John]

> I agree that people panicked in 2001-03, but that panic was
> deliberately stoked by an administration that was pre-disposed to
> go to war with Iraq.

Well, here we disagree. President Bush was mocked and treated
contemptuously by the mainstream press, by the loony left, and by the
Europeans from the day he took office. He was described as an
illegitimate President, and he was ridiculed for his Texas accent and
for his cowboy hat. He was virulently opposed by the mainstream
press, the Democrats, and the loony left on every policy -- every
economic initiative and every foreign policy initiative.

Yet somehow you and the people on the loony left, who otherwise call
Bush the stupidest President in US history, are willing to grant him
the mental superpowers necessary to have created overwhelming support
from Democrats, Republicans, the mainstream press, and even a lot of
the loony left, on one and only one policy -- the ground invasion of
Iraq.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, that makes no sense.
The overwhelming public support for the invasion of Iraq represents a
huge change in attitude and behavior of an overwhelming majority of
the American population. Such a huge change in attitude can only have
come from the people, not from the politicians. It's the kind of
thing that Generational Dynamics recognizes as a generational panic,
and the "58 year hypothesis" provides a plausible explanation for why
it happened.

> I find absolutely no comfort in the fact that Obama has become a
> clone of Bush--in fact, it worries me a great deal.

I can't imagine for the life of me why you think that your comfort
bears any relevance at all to this issue. No one finds comfort in a
coming world war. Generational Dynamics isn't about making you
comfortable, or anybody else comfortable. It's about analyzing
generational trends to determine where the world is and where the
world is going. Comfort is irrelevant.

Well, you seem to grasp that Obama has become a clone of Bush. You've
gotten that far. Now, if any part of your brain is still capable of
logic and reason, perhaps you might consider that if Obama has become
a clone of Bush, then Gore would also have been a clone of Bush, if
he'd been President after 9/11.

To put it another way, President Obama's administration has massively
increased America's troop presence in Afghanistan, has rained bombs
down on Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) with
unmanned drones, and has sent American special forces into FATA, a
foreign country's soil, to chase down the Taliban. It's also become
marginally involved in the war in Yemen.

So to suggest that President Gore would not have pursued an invasion
of Iraq, after the Clinton administration had been bombing the crap out
of Iraq for failing to allow the IAEA's WMD inspections, after Gore
had taken a hard line against Iraq's WMD's during his campaign, after
John Kerry, as late as 2004, said that HE would have approved the
invasion of Iraq -- if after all that, you still think that President
Gore would have just sat back and let the Republicans call him a wimp
for allowing Saddam to develop WMDs, then I would suggest that you're
dreaming.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, all three of these
scenarios -- Bush after 9/11, Gore after 9/11, Obama today -- exhibit
the same characteristics, typical of a generational Crisis era. They
follow the demands of the public, and the public is quick to confront
enemies. Gore would have gone ahead with the Iraq invasion because
the people would have demanded it. Kerry said he would have gone
ahead with the invasion because his polls told him that it would have
cost him votes not to.

If you insist on "finding comfort" by believing fantasies based on the
most fatuous of political and ideological nonsense, then you will
never understand what's going on in the world, and you certainly will
never understand what's going on in this forum and on this web site.

John

[JR]

Dear Xakzen, It is probably true "that the mood of the country was such that war was possible maybe even inevitable." Or at least, the mood of the country was such that its passions could easily be whipped into a lust for war. It's the leaders' job to calm that down.

If Generational Dynamics is a valid theory, its value lies in its ability to illuminate alternatives to the usual blind emotional and/or self-interested impulses that have historically led entire peoples to disaster.

Let's see how this Korean torpedo thing works out. Maybe a little time to cool off, followed by a calm, clear exposition of the facts and a determination by the great powers to stay on an even keel, will produce a surprisingly positive result. Maybe it's time for the Dear Leader to retire, and maybe his son isn't really all that interested in pursuing the family business.

[JR]

Dear John,

First, a small thing. Not a big deal, if it makes you happy, by all means continue, but you use the term "loony left" a lot. This kind of rhetoric makes you appear to be not entirely non-partisan. It might be better to use another, more neutral term, but if that seems unreasonable, perhaps it could be balanced with a more generous use of the term "wingnut."

Anyway.

You respond to my statement,

>> I agree that people panicked in 2001-03, but that panic was
>> deliberately stoked by an administration that was pre-disposed to
>> go to war with Iraq.
>
>Well, here we disagree. President Bush was mocked and treated
>contemptuously by the mainstream press, by the loony left, and by the
>Europeans from the day he took office. He was described as an
>illegitimate President, and he was ridiculed for his Texas accent and
>for his cowboy hat. He was virulently opposed by the mainstream
>press, the Democrats, and the loony left on every policy -- every
>economic initiative and every foreign policy initiative.

"Here we disagree." On what item?
*panic was deliberately stoked
*by an adminstration
*that was pre-disposed to go to war with Iraq.

I will agree with you that George Bush is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that he was a lightweight and totally over his head, that he was elected definitely with fewer popular votes than his opponent and that his supporters achieved his inauguration by subverting the Electoral College and Constitutional processes through improper actions by the Florida Secretary of State and the US Supreme Court. All of this I grant you.

However, granting all that, when one attains office, by whatever means, even if one is a puppet of one's vice president and war minister, one controls considerable resources through the formal respect and obedience accorded to the office. And that is enough to deliberately stoke panic so as to stampede the people toward a pre-determined policy, which often enough in history is a foolish and destructive war.

[John]

First, a small thing. Not a big deal, if it makes you happy, by all means continue, but you use the term "loony left" a lot. This kind of rhetoric makes you appear to be not entirely non-partisan. It might be better to use another, more neutral term, but if that seems unreasonable, perhaps it could be balanced with a more generous use of the term "wingnut."

There's also a loony right - the "birthers," for example.

John

[Oakwood]

John wrote

There's also a loony right - the "birthers," for example.

Funny, I couldn't find any place where you used the term, "loony right." Have you ever used a derogatory term for the right? Why don't you just admit the fact that you have a conservative bias? The fact is, you haven't even addressed my allegation. While Bush may have had much of the country pissed at him in the beginning, we were solidly behind him after 9/11. No one disputes that. Democrats and Republicans actually worked together for a brief time and trusted the President and believed that he was telling the truth about the evidence of Saddam's WMD. The lies that Administration told were so good that a majority of Republicans to this day still believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11!

John, you are such a contradiction. On the one hand you've developed this elaborate, valuable intellectual theory. But as a person, you take pleasure in belittling people who don't agree with you. You're not just condescending, you're actually sadistic. I assume you've had some serious narcissistic injuries when you were growing up, and now you struggle with the fact that the intelligentsia have failed to recognize what you feel is a brilliant theory. When someone criticizes you now, you lash out in anger. But you accomplish nothing by insulting people except making yourself look weak and small-minded.

John wrote

You're a total imbecile and idiot.

John, this is a logical impossibility. An imbecile is someone with an IQ of 26-50 and an idiot has an IQ of 0-25.

[thrive]

It seems to me that every person has a point of view shaped by their experience of the world and no one is unbiased. I don't expect anyone to be unbiased.

Reading many varying viewpoints is important to me -- including the Generational Dynamics website by John Xenakis, which is on my “must read every day” list.

I want to hear what John Xenakis thinks, because of the way he thinks and because of his willingness to spend time gathering information and, thankfully, for explaining what he sees.

Back a few years ago when I first started hearing about credit default swaps on CNBC I wanted to really understand what they were. I did a Google search, and discovered Generational Dynamics by John Xenakis. Immediately I discovered how John makes complicated subjects comprehensible to me. Over the past few years I have seen that John has an incredibly wide and deep knowledge about economics, world history, and what's going on in the world today.

Unlike coverage I see on blogs/websites/TV, John Xenakis doesn't just give his high-level summary point of view, he provides knowledge about the subject matter. If it weren't for this website I would not have a clue about credit default swaps, money flow, inflation vs. deflation, how the carry trade makes a difference in the dollar, about the civil war which just ended in Sri Lanka and countless other insights on China, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and of course, the US. It is well worth the time to search through and read the information in John's book, in the weblogs, and in this forum.

I acknowledge you, John Xenakis, for your immense knowledge and eye-opening analysis/commentary, and I
thank you for sharing your extremely-valuable-to-me point of view on a daily basis.