y FRTothus, December 17 at 1:34 am Link to this comment

Perhaps this would make a lot more sense if we
understood what the US goals were.  Once one gets
past the lies that are used by the administration, it
is not that hard to figure out.

——————-

I guess they keep that information a secret, probably discussed in cables but
since we are not among the millions on the distribution list, we’ll just have to
intuit those goals.

I guess the govt is lot like God—you know, faith and all that.

It’s gotten so bad that I don’t no longer believe that I’m being told the truth
about anything.

Seeing as there is virtually no Al Qaeda in Afghanistan Obama’s “Smart War” would appear to be about routing Al Qaeda out of Pakistan.  Well that should keep our MIC busy for the next Century without having any worry of a success that would ever end the pork barrel. 

“Smart War”?  It is almost as if Obama is betting some insider buddy on how big a whopper he can broadcast with a straight face to the his dumbass public audience.  Unfingbelievable!!

The Noble Peace Laureate of 2009 is giving a progress
report on his war in Afghanistan. I am all ears and
wonder what we will all think 20 years from now about
this charade.

Perhaps this would make a lot more sense if we
understood what the US goals were.  Once one gets
past the lies that are used by the administration, it
is not that hard to figure out.

“There is nothing puzzling ... about America’s
gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or about the
oligarchs’ successful efforts to drag the Republic
into five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy
accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war
accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills
reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into
traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm.
Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and
overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public
hope.”

“The military budget is simply an enormous pork
barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking
the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and,
most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital
supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.”
(Walter Karp)

“You can always hear the people who are willing to
sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud
and they talk all the time. You can find them in
churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures
and congress. That’s their business. They sound
wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground
sanctified by blood. These men who died so
gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our
noble dead.”
(Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun)

“Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may
successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay
in power only if it destroys first of all the
national institutions of its own people.”
(Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951))

“We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at
home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the
American Republic in the past tense. A country that
has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a
nation of laws but an autotocracy run by law
breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation
governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in
which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but
the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.”
(Sam Smith)

“Only the grand scale and technocratic impersonality
of the crimes conceived and directed by the [U.S.]
ruling elite acting under cover of state authority
distinguish them from garden variety killers.”
(Darrell Hamamoto)

“If the U.S. really believes that supporting
terrorists makes you as guilty as the terrorists
themselves, then it would have to put on trial most
of its military and political leadership over the
last handful of administrations, and more.”
(Peter McClaren)

Al-Qaida, there’s something we haven’t heard much about lately.  I thought I remember reading a couple years ago that there were less than 100 Al-Qaida members in Afghanistan.  All this military involvement is needed for less than 100 people?

I also thought I had read that the 9/11 attacks were plotted and planned in Germany and in the United States.  Seems to me that good intelligence and police work would be more effective at stopping future attacks than a military campaign.  Indeed it seems the evidence suggests that better police work could have stopped the 9/11 attacks in the first place. 

Finally the “innocent” 3000 killed in the 9/11 attacks are trotted out as a justification, but how many “innocent” Afghan and Pakistani people have been killed by our drones and bombs?  I would bet a damn site more than 3000.  That is an aspect that is seldom discussed, especially by politicians, how we as a country will kill as many innocent people as we want in the name of creating safety for innocent Americans.  What makes the innocent of other countries so much less valuable?  How much destruction and death are we as a people willing to inflict on others for the feeling of safety at home?

This really gets to the heart of the troubling American mindset and lifestyle.  We will ignore the suffering of others, trash the planet environmentally, kill, maim and destroy so our unsustainable way of life can continue.  If we thought about it once in a while we might shudder as to how much suffering our own way of living causes for others in the world.  Instead, enabling politicians, corporations, and government act as our ego, hiding deeply from view the reality which lives within our subconscious, that we are the monsters we run from.

“OUR” goals? I really can’t remember ever being asked by anyone in power my thoughts or opinion regarding our imperialistic adventures. As in all of our military involvements, follow the money and don’t be fooled by the high-flown rhetoric and principled motives! Hell, even WWII was contrived because BABY wanted a new navy and getting out of that depression was a litle tougher than expected!