Arindam Mukherjee's Blog - Posts Tagged "master-of-the-game"
Of outsourcing, scams etc.
NOTE: I can’t be held responsible for what I write. Everything is somebody else’s fault ;-)
Back in the sixties some foreign language trained Americans could swallow their accent and manage to speak without spitting on your face. With difficulty. The successful ones would then get inside the erstwhile Soviet Union and spend time and tax-money to fathom how a decrepit nation like that could harbour global ambitions. They took more than forty years but did not understand shit about it anyway. This act of controlled spitting on the streets of Moscow as they wondered about stuffs that their brains were clearly unequipped to handle – they called the Cold War. I mean, Russia is cold, and Americans love war. So.
Anyway, this racket survived till the USSR collapsed; and the Yankee-spies-on-speech-and-diet went back to gorge on triple cheese burgers and cola quickly afterwards.
Soon enough the White House found two new bogeymen. Islam and China. But neither the Chinese nor Asian Muslims looked like East Europeans. How to play spy games? How to infiltrate undetected? Seriously, I can’t look like a French or an Italian and pretend to be a Chinese, can I? Mr. Bean can. I can not. So how could I fool someone’s wife in the dark if I didn’t remotely look like that someone?
The scam was simple. Find out a chum that looked like the particular wife’s husband. At least in the dark. Then give him some money, some shady pep talks and he would gun for it like the roadrunner. Yea yea, that makes me a voyeur and all, but whatthehell.
That’s outsourcing. And though Iran has caught a few agents already – never mind that.
Used to be a time when America physically fought wars. Second World War, Vietnam, Korea etc – they were there on the ground. Second World War was more of a Boy Scout drill for them – minimal involvement, distant, and not a territorial threat. You could fly there, bomb them and hit on that cute French bargirl in the evening. No one followed you back. The Germans were too busy or stretched too thin. Fun days.
Vietnam put a semi-stop to that. The world’s hugest, most expensive, most gadget savvy military went to a land they never knew existed, and were massacred by barefooted farmers armed with pre-historic rifles. 60,000 dead Americans, before the warrior boys came home.
They could have learnt some lessons there, but I guess they didn’t. So after a while they invaded Afghanistan.
There they faced bearded Pashtuns with a penchant for juvenile boys. As young American soldiers kept dying in the Hindu Kush region and as the sadomasochistic White House kept hollering about the importance of patriotism and ‘free world’ – the parents said hell with it, get our kids back home.
Now, killing people across both sides has always been a lucrative racket. But a young Yankee couldn’t be at two places simultaneously, could he? At home barbequing in his backyard with friends over a beer, and manning an outpost in Kabul, waiting to blow up anytime? I think it’s kind of tough; the White House thought that too. (I know, great men think alike.)
Well, so how to fight a war when I am not my people and my people are not me? I want my family to beat some monkey up you know, but the members won’t, because the monkey is actually a gorilla, they know that and they also realize that they'd need stretchers halfway through.
Same scam. I would find some street muscles; some outsiders, maybe some gorilla even, who knows. To fight in Libya in 2011 (NATO), and Syria in 2012/13 (Libyan mercenaries, al Qaeda); maybe Pakistan sometime soon (Baluchis, or Indians maybe?), also possibly Iran, in 2014/15 (no idea who, but find I will). I will give them enough money to go do drugs or whatever. If they get ambitious, maybe I will give them some country… damn! don’t nitpick now.
Winning is passé. Because I say so (what did you read? That I am incapable? I dare you!). Destabilizing will do just fine. So I will crank up the defence budget to deal in weapon systems that are mostly redundant in New Age Warfare (keep this a secret, will you). If my countrymen don’t rally behind, I am going to get me some rag-heads to infiltrate territories or fight wars. Outsource.
Need a market – gotta sell those junk hardware.
Back in the sixties some foreign language trained Americans could swallow their accent and manage to speak without spitting on your face. With difficulty. The successful ones would then get inside the erstwhile Soviet Union and spend time and tax-money to fathom how a decrepit nation like that could harbour global ambitions. They took more than forty years but did not understand shit about it anyway. This act of controlled spitting on the streets of Moscow as they wondered about stuffs that their brains were clearly unequipped to handle – they called the Cold War. I mean, Russia is cold, and Americans love war. So.
Anyway, this racket survived till the USSR collapsed; and the Yankee-spies-on-speech-and-diet went back to gorge on triple cheese burgers and cola quickly afterwards.
Soon enough the White House found two new bogeymen. Islam and China. But neither the Chinese nor Asian Muslims looked like East Europeans. How to play spy games? How to infiltrate undetected? Seriously, I can’t look like a French or an Italian and pretend to be a Chinese, can I? Mr. Bean can. I can not. So how could I fool someone’s wife in the dark if I didn’t remotely look like that someone?
The scam was simple. Find out a chum that looked like the particular wife’s husband. At least in the dark. Then give him some money, some shady pep talks and he would gun for it like the roadrunner. Yea yea, that makes me a voyeur and all, but whatthehell.
That’s outsourcing. And though Iran has caught a few agents already – never mind that.
Used to be a time when America physically fought wars. Second World War, Vietnam, Korea etc – they were there on the ground. Second World War was more of a Boy Scout drill for them – minimal involvement, distant, and not a territorial threat. You could fly there, bomb them and hit on that cute French bargirl in the evening. No one followed you back. The Germans were too busy or stretched too thin. Fun days.
Vietnam put a semi-stop to that. The world’s hugest, most expensive, most gadget savvy military went to a land they never knew existed, and were massacred by barefooted farmers armed with pre-historic rifles. 60,000 dead Americans, before the warrior boys came home.
They could have learnt some lessons there, but I guess they didn’t. So after a while they invaded Afghanistan.
There they faced bearded Pashtuns with a penchant for juvenile boys. As young American soldiers kept dying in the Hindu Kush region and as the sadomasochistic White House kept hollering about the importance of patriotism and ‘free world’ – the parents said hell with it, get our kids back home.
Now, killing people across both sides has always been a lucrative racket. But a young Yankee couldn’t be at two places simultaneously, could he? At home barbequing in his backyard with friends over a beer, and manning an outpost in Kabul, waiting to blow up anytime? I think it’s kind of tough; the White House thought that too. (I know, great men think alike.)
Well, so how to fight a war when I am not my people and my people are not me? I want my family to beat some monkey up you know, but the members won’t, because the monkey is actually a gorilla, they know that and they also realize that they'd need stretchers halfway through.
Same scam. I would find some street muscles; some outsiders, maybe some gorilla even, who knows. To fight in Libya in 2011 (NATO), and Syria in 2012/13 (Libyan mercenaries, al Qaeda); maybe Pakistan sometime soon (Baluchis, or Indians maybe?), also possibly Iran, in 2014/15 (no idea who, but find I will). I will give them enough money to go do drugs or whatever. If they get ambitious, maybe I will give them some country… damn! don’t nitpick now.
Winning is passé. Because I say so (what did you read? That I am incapable? I dare you!). Destabilizing will do just fine. So I will crank up the defence budget to deal in weapon systems that are mostly redundant in New Age Warfare (keep this a secret, will you). If my countrymen don’t rally behind, I am going to get me some rag-heads to infiltrate territories or fight wars. Outsource.
Need a market – gotta sell those junk hardware.
