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2004-05-14 Home Front: WoT

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Posted by tipper 2004-05-14 12:45:56 AM|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| [11127 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Do these Stratfor guys get paid by taxpayers? Because they suck. Their analysis is juvenile and little more than whiney staff-puke self-masturbation.

That said, I did think that they did a good job of summing themselves up with their final line,

We have provided you with some facts to show you that we have studied this. But all we have to offer you is blame. It makes us feel important to assign blame. Since blame is an opinion, no one can then accuse us of making mistakes in our analysis. Like movie critics that can't act, we have no real talent of our own, but we believe that if we criticize those who have leading roles, then we can delude others (and ourselves) that we are more important than those whom we observe."

Yawn.. you could get better work from high school students assigned a late night term paper.

Posted by B 2004-05-14 8:54:13 AM|| 2004-05-14 8:54:13 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 My hands get really sore when I wring them like that...

Posted by Fred 2004-05-14 8:56:57 AM|| 2004-05-14 8:56:57 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 Has Stratfor gotten anything right since, oh, say, 9/10/01?

Posted by Mike 2004-05-14 9:15:57 AM|| 2004-05-14 9:15:57 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 Obviously you are not platinum members. I'll give you a hint about platinum level info... can't give ya all it just a gist.... sol, red giant, relatively soon as these things go.

Posted by Shipman 2004-05-14 9:59:44 AM|| 2004-05-14 9:59:44 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 Fred, LOL! You always manage to sum things up best in one snarky little sentence.

Posted by B 2004-05-14 10:10:43 AM|| 2004-05-14 10:10:43 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 SF is interesting and intelligent, but clearly has an agenda here.

Note points 1. They imply (without quite stating so) that Chalabi is working with Iran, and is unreliable, despite the fact that the insinuations linking him to Iran have been largely debunked
2. They say that building democracy is "an irrelevancy and an impossibility"
3. They talk about the importance of working with Baathists, and ignore how that would hurt the US position with the Shiites.
4. While pessimistic on Iraq, they are virtually pollyanish on the turnaround in Saudi, which many of us see as still quite complex, much more precarious than SF says. They also minimize the threat from Syria and Iran - and simply ignore all the evidence that Zarqawi is being financed and supported from those countries - NOT from AQ cells in Pakistan or Afghanistan.
5. As long as the muslim dictatorships are in place, who cares about the muslim street, sayeth SF.

Given the above, is it any wonder that SF comes out strongly against Rummy and Wolfie? At least theyre being ideologically consistent - IE pro-Saudi, pro-Iraqi Sunni Arab, pro-Ex Baathist, pro "realist" emphasis on geopolitics of power, anti Iraqi Shia, anti Iraqi democrats, anti democracy promotion, pro arab dictatorships,
and therefore anti neocon.

Posted by Liberalhawk 2004-05-14 10:14:07 AM|| 2004-05-14 10:14:07 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 its good to read SF, but read Belmont Club, the Weekly Standard, etc as an antidote.

Posted by Liberalhawk 2004-05-14 10:16:03 AM|| 2004-05-14 10:16:03 AM|| Front Page Top

#8 I can think of about 240,000 reasons that dull this "razor's edge". I bet SF won't take this debate face to face with those 240,000 reasons. But if SF doesn't think the world is a safer place today when folks from the US are in Libya dismantling WMDs then they wouldn't believe a pissed off private stomping a greasy spot in their butt debating their "failures".

Posted by TopMac 2004-05-14 12:20:13 PM|| 2004-05-14 12:20:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 Has Stratfor gotten anything right since, oh, say, 9/10/01

Hey, I read StratFor during the *Kosovo* crisis, and they sucked then, too.

So, they have consistency going for them...

Posted by Carl in NH 2004-05-14 8:45:10 PM|| 2004-05-14 8:45:10 PM|| Front Page Top

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