Want Some Truth About Afghanistan? Read Ann Jones. March 8, 2012

Ann Jones knows more about Afghanistan than any of the  fools in American politics and the American military and the  American White House.

Read her commentary on the latest goings on, and get a good history lesson too, over at Common Dreams.

And then consider that the same American politicians and American military who have spent eleven years learning nothing about Afghanistan other than how to kill women, children, and  farmers, now want to go to Iran to perform the same ceremonies of ignorance and blood.

And isn’t it ironic that modern day Iran can easily be considered a creation of American policy?

Stupid is as stupid does.

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Iran: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose November 12, 2011

America’s wading into the Big Muddy again.

How many times, America, how many times?

They’re at it again…

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Libya August 22, 2011

Congratulations to the Lions of Libya.

They probably don’t call themselves that, but they should. A few months ago they were a ragtag amateur collection of angry young men seeking freedom from a forty-year tyranny.

They didn’t have a chance in hell of succeeding but they charged into battle against professional, disciplined forces. And got their collective ass kicked. And refused to quit.

NATO forces saved them, kept them going, helped train them and turn them into a force that could survive and learn. But those guys did it themselves, did the fighting, did the dying. Their blood stains the sand from one end of Libya to the other. And as of this morning they’ve bloodied Tripoli and are on the verge of ending Kadhafy.

I hope they hold it together and develop a rational, egalitarian government with a minimum of bloodshed.

Was the United States right to get involved?

Morally? Yes.

Financially? No.

The United States is failing to care for its own people, to take care of its own governance. Does it have the right to interfere in the governance of other countries?

Does such interference nonetheless make the United States a moral country in such matters?

No.

Syria’s tyrant continues to slaughter the Syrian people and continues to lie to the world about his actions. The United States does virtually nothing, its proclamation of sanctions an empty gesture, unsupported by other major players in the sanctions game. Will the Syrians, if they get rid of al-Assad, look to Libya and ask where was the United States when we fought and died?

And Bahrain, what of Bahrain? The people rose up, were slaughtered, were further victimized by Saudi troops, while the United States looked on, supported the Saudi move, said nothing, did nothing, unwilling to risk losing its military assets in Bahrain. What will the Bahrainis ask when they look to Libya?

Afghanistan? The United States, and its so-called allies, continue to brutalize that country by fighting, on the ground, in a civil and religious war. They have succeeded only in destabilizing the entire region, and continue to honor their own dead by insuring that more Americans and many more Afghanis will die in pursuit of a vague goal that makes no sense on any level, to wit, that no terrorist ever attacks the United States from Afghanistan again, completely ignoring that the attack in question came not from Afghanistan, but from airports and flight training centers in the United States and could just as easily have been organized in Peoria and operated from Dallas. But the killing and the waste goes on under the aegis of bobblehead politicians in Washington and their profiteering corporate masters.

Iraq? What’s to be said of Iraq? Only that George W. Bush and his cohort of amoral greedmeisters should long ago have been arrested and locked up in Guantanamo with the so-called terrorists from overseas. The Bushies would have been the real terrorists in Gitmo cages.

So while the Libyan fighters deserve their victory, the United States, which helped the Lions of Libya defeat their tyrant, once again appears to be the clumsy elephant in the room, the amoral giant which has eyes only for its bright and shiny drug of choice – oil – and cares not a whit who dies as it pursues its addiction, pursues it right to the graveyards of Asia and the Middle East as it makes a graveyard of the world.

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The March of Orwell’s Lemmings (You Listening, Barack?)(No, I’m Not!) August 21, 2011

Good piece (short one) by Ray McGovern over at Common Dreams on the United States’ lemming march to the sea of Afghanistan (and other istans, if you will).

And BTW, according to one commenter (dreamdancer), the whole lemmings march into the sea myth was a cruel deception created by those wonderful animal abusers at the Disney Empire of Bambi.

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The Progressive Rips Obama’s ‘More War’ Speech June 23, 2011

Matthew Rothschild over at The Progressive Magazine site takes apart President Obama’s speech on the so-called troop drawdown in Afghanistan.

Obama and his crew are bullshitting us, plain and simple. Thousands of people will die for his political rhetoric and his pandering to the forces of right-wing warmongering and stupidity.

For three years we’ve watched this guy, waiting for some real change, some real courage, only to discover he hasn’t got the balls to take on the right-wing scum whose only goal is to scuttle a Democratic administration and sink the country into a fascistic theocracy to enrich themselves.

He’s delusional. His policies are delusional. His advisers are delusional. They all fit right in with a delusional Republican-dominated government of greed, willful ignorance, and stiff-necked arrogance.

Nuts to the whole bunch of them.

I’ve got to go feed the cats. At least they’re smarter, and better company, that this bunch of Washington fools, clowns, and sociopaths.

A Sense of Perspective: Osama Bin Laden and Claude Choules May 5, 2011

Last Thursday, April 31, a 110-year-old man named Claude Stanley Choules died in Perth, Australia.

Choules was British, and he served over 40 years in the Royal Navy, in both England and Australia.

In 1915, at the age of 14, Choules joined the Navy, lying about his age to get in after being turned down by the army. He served in the brutal and disastrous Gallipoli campaign when the Allied forces tried to take the Dardanelles seaway from Ottoman Turkish forces.

Choules’s grandson said, “There was definitely no glory in it from his point of view. He firmly believed that war was a pure waste of time, resources and human life.”

Choules was the last surviving combat veteran of World War I.

Two days after Choules died a team of United States commandos killed Osama Bin Laden, head of the al-Qaeda organization, in a villa in Pakistan.

It could be argued that the war in which Choules served, the Great War, the War To End All Wars, continues today, that it in fact never ended, that its policies and its echoes continue to kill untold thousands of people every year.

From a November 2001 speech given by Osama Bin Laden:

Following World War I, which ended more than 83 years ago, the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner – under the British, French, and Italian governments.

They divided the whole world, and Palestine was occupied by the British.

Since then, and for more than 83 years, our brothers, sons, and sisters in Palestine have been badly tortured.

The actions of the Allied Powers in the Middle East following the Great War, and their continued activities in the Islamic countries during the twentieth century, created, enabled, and supported the brutal tyrannies that continue to terrorize the people there. Bin Laden and his ilk chose to fight back. 

From Gallipoli to the fall of the World Trade Center is not a big leap. Perhaps irony attaches to the deaths of these two men so close together. Perhaps not, as the war that united them is not yet done.

The United States and its allies might do well to consider what their grandchildren will reap from what their governments sow in the world today.

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Technorati Tags: Claude Choules, Osama bin Laden, WWI, The Great War, The War to End All Wars, Terrorism, al Qaeda, Gallipoli, 9/11, World Trade Center, September 11

The Burning Gun: Iraq War Really Was About Oil… April 23, 2011

Over at Common Dreams Ray McGovern writes about the release of British government documents demonstrating that the destruction of Iraq, the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, the savaging of the American taxpayer, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and the creation of four million Iraqi refugees was in large part done to put profits into the hands of fat cat oil executives, pretty much the same ones ripping off the taxpayers today.

So all you patriotic Americans, your family members died and got their bodies and minds torn up to create profits for the rich people who today continue to do their very best to destroy democracy in America and anywhere in the world where they can make a buck.

From McGovern’s article:

Prime Minister Tony Blair was equally disingenuous in his public remarks. On April 19, Democracy Now ran a brief clip in which British author Muttitt called to mind Blair’s assurances to a TV audience on Feb. 6, 2003, six weeks before the war: “The idea that we’re interested in Iraq’s oil is absurd, it’s one of the most absurd conspiracy theories you can imagine.”

Muttitt pointed out that, as Blair was saying this, a secret (until now) Foreign Office document setting out British strategy toward Iraqi oil asserted, “Britain has an absolutely vital interest in Iraq’s oil.”

Plenty more. Worth reading.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, War for oil, Ray McGovern, Common Dreams, Tony Blair

Remember Afghanistan? It’s Not Going Away. The Damn Fool’s In The Big Muddy, Again. March 29, 2011

Do you remember this, the last verse of Pete Seeger’s song:

Knee deep in the Big Muddy
And the fools keep yelling, Push on
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling, Push on
Waist deep, neck deep
We’ll be drowning before too long
We’re neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the damn fools keep yelling to push on

Nothing much has changed if you believe Ray McGovern’s piece over at Common Dreams. Same fools, different names, same games.

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Richard Holbrooke, Diplomatic Giant: Not So Much, Not So Much December 14, 2010

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and military intelligence officer, doesn’t agree with all the praise being heaped on the freshly dead Richard Holbrooke. He’s got quite another point of view, expressed at the site Consortium News.

A couple of bits:

And, in the curious standards of Official Washington, Holbrooke’s circumspection and silence – even as countless “small” people get wounded and killed – is cause for lionizing him in death.

And…

And the American troops? It is hard to escape the conclusion that Holbrooke shared the view of Henry Kissinger, another devotee of Realpolitik diplomacy who had little regard for the humanity and value of common soldiers.

In the book Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed its Own POWs in Vietnam, Kissinger is quoted as saying: “Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

Not the hero our politicos and media pretty boys are making him out to be.

Worth reading.

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Technorati Tags: Richard Holbrooke, Afghanistan, War, Politics, Al Qaeda, Balkan War, Vietnam, Pakistan, War on Terror, Henry Kissinger, Consortium News, Ray McGovern, Foreign Relations, Diplomatic Corps

Americans, Afghans Negotiating Peace With Taliban Imposter. Now, About Those Drone Strikes… November 23, 2010

According to the New York Times the man the American and Afghan governments have been negotiating with to bring peace to Afghanistan is an imposter who does not represent the Taliban.

Think about that for a minute. They vetted this guy, they sat down at a negotiating table with this guy, they gave him a lot of money, and it turns out he’s a fraud, possibly even a Pakistani ISI agent. This was one guy, in the open, in a high profile setting, and everybody got it wrong.

What does that say about all our drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan on ‘suspected’ insurgents, people who don’t get vetted, don’t get talked with, don’t get questioned, don’t get investigated? We just kill them, and everyone around them, including women and children, because our bright boys in the government and the military ‘suspect’ them. Some dumbass twenty-year-old American ‘warrior’ or ‘hero’ in Oklahoma pulls the trigger on a pilotless drone on the other side of the world and blows away families because somehow someone ‘suspects’ somebody getting blown up is an ‘insurgent’.

That’s about as good a definition of insanity, stupidity, and evil as we’re going to get, and it works for the whole American government, right up to the top.

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Technorati Tags: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Taliban, Taliban Imposter, Peace Talks, Politics, War, Drone Strike, New York Times