Category Archives: War

UPDATED: Reeducating Occupied Afghanis

Drug War, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

The American people are not the only dupes to be patronized and bullied by the Empire’s congressional-military-media complex. According to RawStory.com, “A report (PDF) from the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) shows that 92 percent of Afghans surveyed had never heard of the coordinated multiple attacks on US soil on September 11, 2001. It also shows that four in 10 Afghans believe the US is on their soil in order to ‘destroy Islam or occupy Afghanistan.'”

As the report would have it, these silly people simply don’t understand that the entity we call NATO, but is really the US, needs to be in Afghanistan for their own good; the good of the Afghan people. For example, to destroy their only source of income: the poppy fields.

And so a reeducation program must commence. “‘We need to explain to the Afghan people why we are here, and both show and convince them that their future is better with us than with the Taliban,’ ICOS lead field researcher Norine MacDonald said in a statement.”

Remember “Radio Sawa”? You should. If you are a tax payer, you pay for it. Part of the neocon’s democratic deal in Iraq was that we got to pipe into Iraqi ears pro-American propaganda interspersed with J. Lo’s caterwauling and Jay-Z’s gutter grunts. The idea was to make them both love us and want to be like us.

Why don’t we do the same for the Afghans? We could buy them all little radio transistors, and pipe “Radio Sawa” type propaganda into their long-suffering ears.

But first, let them get high on opium. Where I do agree with the think tank is in its proposal “that Afghanistan license the growing of opium.”

In December 24, 2001 I advocated, “Freedom and choice – not prohibition, incarcerations and coerced treatment – are the best salve for a people that has been infantalized and brutalized for too long. In a country with a poor infrastructure, the ‘relatively stable value of opium and its nonperishability means that it can also serve as an important source of savings and investment among traders and cultivators.'”

UPDATE: For those of you who are new to my opinion on America’s foreign policy, please read up on the term “Reeducation.” After you have searched my Articles Archive under the relevant categories, of course.

Debt Commission Dross

Debt, Economy, Military, Politics, Regulation, Ron Paul, Taxation, The State, War, Welfare

As has been said over these pixelated pages, “government commissions are where accountability goes to die.” You get my meaning. For example: Some major cost-cutting measures suggested by Obama’s deficit commission’s preliminary report only kick-in in 2050 and 2075.

Like his father, Rand Paul promises to be a beacon for liberty. Intuitively, Rand cleaves to free-market principles. Here are some salient points Rand has made in response to some silly questions, concerning the deficit commission’s preliminary report, fielded from Face The Nation moderator Bob Schieffer:

“… if you’re serious about the budget, you have to look at the entire budget–military and domestic, if you want to make a dent in the debt.

“…I don’t think I want to raise taxes right now. I think government
is too big and so I think we need to cut spending. The way I see it is, is that you want the private sector to have more money. I want to expand the private sector because we have a– a serious recession so I want to leave more money in the private sector. I want to shrink the ineffective sector of the economy which is the government.”

“… I want to be on the side of reducing spending. So I think really the compromise is where you find the reductions in spending. But I don’t think the compromise is in raising taxes. I mean here, you have to put things in perspective. We now consume at the federal level twenty-five percent of the Gross Domestic Product. [Actually, it is more like 40%, as a lot of spending is off budget] Historically, we were at twenty percent. So we’ve taken five percent away from the private sector. And the private sector is the engine that creates all these jobs. I want to send that five percent back to the private sector.”

“…you should shrink the federal work force and you should make their pay more comparable. Right now the total compensation for government workers versus private workers is almost two to one.”

“…make the tax cuts permanent.”

MORE…

UPDATE III: The Daily Detritus (“You Lie… Lots, W”)

Bush, Iraq, War

Today it’s “W.” I knew George Bush was one sick son of … Mommy Dearest. Barbara Bush, made Genghis B., then a teenage boy, drive her to the hospital after she had miscarried. On her lap this awful woman carried the remains of the expelled fetus, which she showed to boy George.

Did we really need to know this? And why oh why has this dreadful man come out of hiding!

I have no wish to re-litigate his murderous reign. But the idea that Bush was justified in waging war on Iraq is preposterous. The fact that “W” has come out with His Truth to loud applause reflects very badly on his base, which includes very many American historians.

“BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE”:

Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized.

But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you? Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for “the degeneracy of manner and morals” which James Madison warned war would bring—the same “bring ’em on” grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of “war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,” he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

Hold the CIA responsible for giving in to the War Party’s pressure, if you will. But recognize that the CIA was only obeying the wishes of its masters. The CIA had attempted to resist. Witness the early statements by Vince Cannistraro, former counterterrorism chief, who scoffed at the concoction of an al-Qaida-Iraq connection. Having come under fire after September 11, the agency gave in to White House pressure to politicize and shape the lackluster information.

Unforgivable? Yes. But consider who the intelligence community takes its corrupt cues from. Perhaps New Jersey’s poet laureate Amiri Baraka had a point when he wondered, “Who know [sic] what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleezza.” The National Security Adviser has since September 11 been rocking the intelligence community with her antipathy to the truth. As if her Saddam-seeded nuclear-winter forecasts were not bad enough, on September 8, 2002, she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “We do know that there have been shipments into Iraq of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to nuclear weapons programs.” “That’s just a lie,” an appalled David Albright of the Institution for Science and International Security told The New Republic.

In her latest damage control interview with Blitzer, Rice continued to insist that Saddam Hussein was threatening his neighbors when the president pounced, and, as justification for the war, she still makes reference to Saddam’s effort to pursue a nuclear program in … 1991, and to the burying of old centrifuge parts prior to the first Gulf War. Rice, of course, continues to deny the Niger forgery.

Clearly, Whitehall and Washington will not willingly give up their dark secrets. With few exceptions, such as U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd; Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Dennis Kucinich; John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee; and Bob Graham of Florida, the utterly disposable and detestable Democrats have been only too pleased to aid and abet this (heritable) executive dictatorship.

And the media will continue to do what their collective intelligence permits: focus only on the one lie, thus making the lattice more impenetrable.

UPDATE I (Nov. 9): LOOTER. Genghis Bush is now openly exhibiting the pistol his invading army looted off Saddam Hussein. At the very least, this is tacky. Primitive.

UPDATE II (Nov. 10): YOU LIE, W. SPIEGEL ONLINE: “Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has said that ex-US President George W. Bush is not telling the truth in his memoirs, released on Tuesday. Schröder said he never offered his unconditional support for Bush’s aggressive policy against Iraq.

In his memoirs, called “Decision Points” and released on Tuesday, Bush writes that Schröder told him in January 2002 that the US president had his full support when it came to his aggressive Iraq policy. Bush wrote that Schröder indicated he would even stand behind Bush should the US go to war against the country.
On Tuesday evening in Berlin, Schröder denied that he ever made such a promise. “The former American president is not telling the truth,” he said. He said the meeting in question focused on the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and whether those responsible were supported by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
“Just as I did during my subsequent meetings with the American president, I made it clear that, should Iraq … prove to have provided protection and hospitality to al-Qaida fighters, Germany would reliably stand beside the US,” Shröder said. “This connection, however, as it became clear during 2002, was false and constructed.”

UPDATE III: LOTS OF LYING. SPIEGEL ONLINE: “With its invasion of Iraq, the United States rid the Iraqi people of a tyrant. But it also broke the law and destroyed tens of thousands of lives. With the release of close to 400,000 Iraq logs by WikiLeaks and the coming publication of George W. Bush’s memoir, it is time to take stock of a war that was catastrophic for Iraq and America’s standing in the world.”

“In early October, there were 500 unidentified bodies in the Baghdad city morgues. According to one doctor, just as many bodies are being delivered to morgues today as in 2007. At least 630 people were shot to death with silenced pistols in the last three months alone. Although most were guards at checkpoints, the victims also included politicians and their relatives, as well as a television reporter who suddenly collapsed in the middle of a broadcast, in broad daylight. The source of the fatal shot could not be located. The atmosphere is eerie.”

“‘I have friends who returned from their self-imposed exile in Damascus last year. Now they’re packing their bags again,’ says Ahmed, a young attorney who is sitting under a ceiling fan in the Shah Bandar Café in downtown Baghdad”

UPDATED: Tea Party Must Go To War With The War Party (Abu Ghraib à la Afghanistan)

Debt, Economy, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, War

Ending the warfare state is the only ray of hope for down-and-out, indebted America. With laser-like precision, Pat Buchanan zeroes in on the tack the tea party must take if it is to tackle the federal-induced “deficit-debt crisis, a national debt nearing 100 percent of gross domestic product and a deficit of 10 percent of GDP.” There is only “one place where a bipartisan majority may be found for major spending cuts: defense and the empire, the warfare state.”

“After Iraq and Afghanistan,” writes Buchanan, in “Tea Party vs. War Party?”, “the American people are not going to give the establishment and War Party a free hand in foreign policy. Every patriot will do what is necessary and pay what is needed to defend his country. But national security is one thing, empire security another.”

There is another matter I have raised in “Statism Starts With You!” and other recent columns, and it is “America’s fondness for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which combined, account for close to half of the federal government’s budget.” “Only 7 percent of the country will consider slashing the first two welfare programs. And a mere eleven percent of those living in the ‘Land of the Free’ are prepared to pare down Medicaid. Keep the government out of my Medicare!”

For a lack of any other viable option for stalling State spending, the Tea Party must position itself in opposition to Obama’s volitional and inherited wars; ignore Mr. Hannity’s nagging about “Empire security,” and preach and proselytize about the end of Empire.

If ever there was a religious cause, ending America’s military forays abroad is it.

UPDATE: Abu Ghraib à la Afghanistan. You remember the pornographic pictorials from Abu Ghraib prison, starring some sadistic and slutty servicemen and women? Well, GI JOE and GI HO have relocated. And they will continue to do their thing until the US government stops unleashing them in other countries. (Place them on the US-Mexico border where they can scare some gangsters their own size—drug cartel members—if that’s not posse comitatus.)

HERE goes:

Those who have seen the photos say they are grisly: soldiers beside newly killed bodies, decaying corpses and severed fingers.
The dozens of photos, described in interviews and in e-mails and military documents obtained by The Associated Press, were seized by Army investigators and are a crucial part of the case against five soldiers accused of killing three Afghan civilians earlier this year.