big wet game of chicken impending

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I feel there were a lot of reasons the SCO brought in Afghanistan and Pakistan and India and Iran, but specifically excluded participation or monitoring from the U.S. Department of State. All these panicked people about what happens if they dump their dollar reserves is shaping up to be somewhat beside the point. I think they are interested in uniting the Asian continent as a bloc to back down our aggression there. I'm sure they're not into North Korea's nuclear nonsense, but I think also that they are all aware that we are doing everyone more harm than good, both financially and in the grand geopolitical chess game.

A snippet from a Jeremy Scahill interview sort of helps illustrate what I mean:

Let's step back and look at what we've seen happen over five months of the Obama administration when it comes to foreign policy.

We've seen a radical escalation of the war in Afghanistan. We've seen Obama continue to use a quarter-million U.S. contractors--50 percent of the force that's fighting the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's increasing the number of mercenaries in Afghanistan by 29 percent and approximately 23 percent in Iraq.

He's continuing the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and maintaining the monstrous U.S. embassy that was built, in part, on the basis of slave labor. He's continuing to dole out contracts to KBR, the single greatest corporate beneficiary of the war, despite the fact that its work has electrocuted [to death] U.S. soldiers.

He's pumping up the National Endowment for Democracy, the leading organ to promote U.S. neoliberal economic policy and interfere in the elections and democratic processes of countries where the outcome might not be favorable to U.S. interests. He's continuing to use the rhetoric of the war on drugs in Latin America.

Overall, he's implementing a U.S. foreign policy that in some ways--or, I think, in many ways--advances the interest of the American empire in a way the Republicans could only have dreamed of doing.

What people, I think, misunderstand about Barack Obama is that this is a man who is a brilliant supporter of empire--who has figured out a way to essentially trick a lot of people into believing they're supporting radical change, when in effect what they're doing is supporting a radical expansion of the U.S. empire.

I think that it's a bit disingenuous for people to act as though they were somehow hoodwinked by Barack Obama about this.

If people were playing close attention during the election--not just to the rhetoric of his canned speech that he gave repeatedly, and the commercials, and the perception of his supporters was that he somehow was this transformative figure in U.S. politics, but also to the documents being produced by the Obama campaign and the specific policies he outlined--you realized that Barack Obama was very much a part of the bipartisan war machine that has governed this country for many, many decades.

What we see with Obama's policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the broader Arab and Muslim world, as well as his global economic policies, are a continuation of the most devastating and violent policies of the Bush administration--while placing a face on it that makes it easier to expand the iron fist of U.S. militarism and the hidden hand of the free market in a way that Republicans, I think, would have been unable to do at this point in history.

They've got to be darn certain they don't have to put up with our adventures in fuel monopoly anymore, not if they stick together, and I think they will... or at least I think they have every reason to.

SCO Joint Communiqué

Yekaterinburg Declaration