Spin creates counterspin, and what else is new? I take it you don’t really believe social commentary and political opinion — either the “mongering” or the “realist” types — should quit hollering foul and go along to get along. Whining is a long and hallowed tradition that may actually suffer for a while as our means of giving and taking competing whines goes through changes and the death of old media and paper you can HO-O-O-OLD….

While “empires,” as you put it, have all tended toward entropy (fallen), there have always been the informed and edumuckated whiners who have enjoyed tweaking folks and pointing out what’s been going wrong. Some whiney tweakers have been blowing smoke and simply ranting in support of what drags us down in the first place, but hey, that’s why the post-Magna-Carta Founding Daddies (upstanding Deists all) hammered the US constitution and other problematical documents into being: All hail the marketplace of good mixed with the not-so-good and even some lousy ideas. That’s where interesting, sometimes even constructive changes come from, not to mention the War in Iraq and WOT, when America paused for a time and allowed Neoconservative utopean idealism and 14th Century enlightenment another go.

It is, of course, not subject to debate that, as you say, “maybe this is all as it should be,” and that we’ll never get rid of “unsustainable excess” from nation state governments and nonstate “actors” with human prejudices and imperfections. The debate over whether social scientists compromise themselves by embedding with military forces, is an old and nasty one, with good points on all sides. Whether a bevy of anthropologists advise the “coalition” military on local perceptions and what locals in a war zone seem to think they want and need, or we go along without “experts,” the end result always seems to be bad. Introduce the “experts” and their own lame attempts at ethical codes are invalidated, so with the normal disaster we also lose much trust in that “expertise”. We end up losing the Powell “Doctrine” as well as a mollifying voice.

They even chose to ignore intelligence pros. I suspect that’s what softened military intel folks to accept more wild-eyed contingents of “social scientists” finally, as spurred on by General Dave.

Power is intoxicating, even for Obama. Change is always slow, and usually not what one was expecting. Unlike physics, societies don’t operate according to pat formulae. Obama knew this, and that may be one reason why he has appeared to keep his cool through the inevitable chaos.

But at least we can try to help amplify some voices of reason, even if we discover years from now that we were wrong too.
GT

What is wrong with calling them social scientists, rather than Human terrain analyists? Is the point you are making that over-simplification and failure to understand cultural issues going to be the end of us? Spin is the nature of greedy hegmonic interests. Its a feature, not a bug.
Maybe this is all as it should be. Unsustainable excess brings down all empires. Seeing Obama in office, I don’t beleive he can stop it, if he actually wanted to in the first place. Power is intoxicating.

The policies or procedures haven’t changed, only the face and the rhetoric.
700 dead civilians in punjab, with 12 dead Taliban since Obama took office.
Isreali IDF assassins are picking off Gaza Farmers working their fields, Israel is still bulldozing orchards in Gaza, and homes in Jerusalem while making room for Jewish only housing developments. Settlement expansion continues, while Gazans pick through rubble and struggle to get through a single day.