You are being very unpatriotic undermining a most profitable enterprise. You must hate corporations denying them their rightful war profiteering. We get to test remote controlled killer drones. We get to prove American exceptionalism. We might even be using the super duper top secret thingie that Bob Woodward reported on. This secret something has brought victory in Irak. Most of the casualties are third world peasants, who make hashish. Plus our soldiers get health care even when they are killed. It is all good!

Woo Hoo! My first zed!

The Iraq war was a straight up lie about WMDs and Saddam and getting rid of a enemy of Israel and of course the Oil. Afghanistan was about getting OBL because they supposedly were behind 911. We need to kick ass because “they” got a jab in and it was a POW.

The problem of course is that the case was never made as much as asserted. There will always be enemies to empire. Most will make mischief not big enough to go to war over.

There never was a real threat to our nation that war would solve. There is no army to defeat. There may be a bunch of “rebels” in the mountains like Che and Fidel who came down and thew Battista’s ass out of Cuba and his oligarch with him. This is not a scenario for the USA. The “towel heads” are not about to sneak in and take over america. And if we got our butts out of the rest of the world they would hardly know we were here. Why would they care?

These wars are because the MIC wants them and they will invent the reasons, instill the fear in Americans, call for patriotism and justify their existence. Money is being made. Power is being amassed.

These various industrial complexes are too big to dismantle. They just gobble up resources – absent rational justifications – Health care Industrial complex, MIC, Media Industrial complex, telcom industrial complex, energy industrial complex, financial industrial complex.

There is no rational reason to be in South Asia.

Doesn’t it say:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the right for corporations to pursue a profit at any cost to society.

Or something very like it?

Cmdr. Dan has been all over this disaster at zenhuber.blogspot and has no love for the generals, admirals and other assorted fools. Including the Pres.

Any war – Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran – is as good as fine gold to Eric Prince and Blackwater and Biggus Dickus and Halliburton Oil Services.

Still killing peasants and still reaping huge profits.

That’s Obama – the dreaded black Socialist.

Excellent post.

Imagine an America with a small defense department? Can you?

Health care for all!

The DOD is too big to fail!

You get a situation where Marines lose four guys because the don’t get the air and arty they were promised and someone is going to get hurt.

It ain’t just the left, check out Pat Lang.

If Obama is going to claim things like we are still under threat.. he needs to cough up legitimate proof. I don’t doubt we are, but whether it rises to the level of endless war / occupation is highly unlikely. And we have had years to do the spook investigation thing.. let’s lay some real data on the national table.

Actually Jeff, I was getting a bit snarky due to the frustration of this never ending cluster fuck. In fact, YOU ARE VERY PATRIOTIC! This is an eight year war and it is getting to be quagmire city just as Viet Nam was. I hate this insanity and I definitely hate Bob Woodward, one of the greatest liars who pretends to be a “journalist”.

I honestly don’t think any of this is stoppable. Our MIC has grown to the largest entrenched corporate entity on the the planet. Its mindlessness and powers of self-perpetuation are far beyond any political power of restraint.

The things that our forebears trembled about, from Jefferson to Ike. Well, here we are.

Unfortunately I see our shenanigans ultimately causing Pakistan to fall into chaos. Meanwhile our spinoff MIC sitcom Israel in recent days looks more and more jumpy to finally do this thing with Iran.

I do not expect hilarity to ensue.

Is there anyone in our country, including people who represent us, who will do serious opposition? Yep, we’re a killer nation. Is anyone paying attention? Maybe we could start not paying taxes in protest; that would get a minute on the news.

TROOPS
HOME
NOW

(Goddess, how many times have I written that in comments, here — and for how many years?)

I sure haven’t heard Barney Frank repeat his call to reduce DoD expenditures by 25% lately, have you?

Outstanding post, Jeff. Thank you.

Jeff, ” … the strangely obsessed Obama escalation.” ??

What does that mean?

There are threats all over the world. According to Obama’s strategy – to eliminate terrorism by killing all the terrorists and civilian peasants as collateral damage (same as Dubya’s) we should “engage” The Philippines in the Southern and Central Islands; Somalia; Pakistan; Indonesia; and Canada (there are Mosques there).

When more “terrist cells” pop up, we should follow suit.

All BS to fill the coffers of the MIC and Big Oil.

We can’t kill all the terrists no matter how hard we try.

In particular, I doubt that there are many Afghanis who have the capacity to plan and execute an attack on the US.

Colin Powell facilitated the funding ($43 Million) of the Taliban before 9ll:

Bush’s Faustian Deal With The Taliban.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010604/20010522

Instead of the British Raj we now have the American Raj. It is strange to see how this country has morphed into Victorian Britain in its attitude towards “The lesser breeds without the law”. Who will be our Kipling to commemorate the deeds of our soldiers? Will our subalterns have to call out “Play up! Play up and play the game”? (I know that’s Newbolt and not Kipling, but the point is the same.)Will we send troops to the Northwest Frontier each summer?

the problem is the zbig is obombya’s eminence grise. his acolyte continues zbig’s[david’s] great game.

and since the rockefeller’s own the entirety of the usg, this game will not be suspended.

your bucks. your sons and daughters. all harvested for the hydrocarbons that the rockefellers have been pursuing for decades.

The spooks have had years, but don’t forget that cheney was pulling the strings. They probably haven’t been independant for the last 8 years.

Senate panel OKs $128 billion for wars

WASHINGTON – With hardly any debate, a powerful Senate committee Thursday approved President Barack Obama’s $128 billion request for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the budget year beginning in October.

If the US has not gotten bin Laden and Zawahiri in 8 years, then I think al Qaeda already has a safe haven.

It was Obama’s responsibility to define our Afghanistan policy. Instead he farmed it out to a neocon like Reidel and then to McChrystal. The result is that we have no Afghanistan policy. We are waging a war in search of one. As in Iraq, we also overlook the ethnic conflicts which any such policy would have to address. I still think this debate of the McChrystal report is because McChrystal asked for the moon, and the Pentagon and White House are trying to figure out how not to give him it but at the same time give him enough for CYA purposes.

I will again post my 3 questions that I think any policy must answer.

1. What do we want?

2. What can we do?

3. What can we live with?

If Obama answered these he would have a policy and it would probably entail a major drawdown in the US and NATO presence in Afghanistan.

I hate it when people say this,

why bother to mention that the recent Afghan election was rife with fraud

Afghanistan is suffering under a hostile foreign military occupation. “Rife with fraud”? Are you seriously suggesting that any country under a military occupation by another country can possibly have a meaningful democracy? or “elections”? That’s ridiculous.

Jeff Kaye does well to be addressing this American Expedition in Asia which more and more is shapeshifting into something very similar to the 1960’s ramp up the Pentagon conducted in Vietnam.

Vietnam was a genuine strategic mistake. A terrible conflict imposed on the nation of Vietnam and the Vietnamese by a over funded,under thought out train of bad reasoning,poor policy choices and run amok bad history reads and ignorance of serial errors and consequences by WashingtonDC and the Pentagon.

The inside story of why Pentagon is putting so much military muscle into and across large swaths of Asia surely has to do with energy politics and corporate gaming of what can be exploited and how to get it to market and extract the profits(private) and pass off the costs(taxpayer paid military muscle-socialized).

Concur with Sander’s comment here.

Ultimately WashingtonDC must face the funding this conflict is chewing through every 30 days.

Americans are borrowing money from abroad to keep this up.

That is Empire by Credit Card. This is not sustainable.

On issues of accountability:

“The Americans said they would investigate and “take allegations like this seriously.” But no one takes the U.S. statements on the matter seriously”..
Jeff Kaye~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I heard Obama refer to accountability last night in regard to insurance companies…..I didn’t take THAT statement seriously,either.

They say to follow the money.

I always wondered about insurance and these war-for-profit “expeditions.”

Propublica has an excellent link to these issues,and the cost to the taxpayer.

Disposable Army – ProPublicaJun 19, 2009 … Citing high insurance premiums paid by the Pentagon, … As a contractor in Iraq, Skoug nearly lost his life when his vehicle hit an anti-tank … (We’re licensed under Creative Commons, which provides the legal details. …
http://www.propublica.org/series/disposable-army – Similar

Rethink war and all who profit from it?–sure, in a New York minute. Until the leaders of the Democratic party actually say that out loud and reject defense industry contributions, we will always be at war. Money talks, and you, my friends are crying in the wind. Corporations are not persons in our constitution–that is a bad decision in a bad supreme court that congress needs to legislate against. But the “elected” elite are on the gravy train. It is a mobious strip of bull. What do we do about it? This is our government.

I agree, this is sliding into a bad situation and likely some exit plan is needed. I don’t think anyone can make this work.

You folks have a good time. I am about as liberal as you get, but the irrational thought and non sequiters are breath-taking.

I’m convinced that every person who believes we should remain in Afghanistan is absolutely insane, driven by greed, or both.

The Karzai government is incredibly corrupt and just stole the election. We’re killing more civilians than Taliban and therefore creating more enemies than supporters. The Afghan Army is ineffective because its members are more loyal to the warlords that run their provinces back home than Afghanistan or the Karzai government. Al Qaida no longer represents much of a threat and can be dealt with more effectively through occasional police actions and protecting the integrity of our own borders.

I say to Hell with the MIC and all war enthusiasts. Bring our troops home NOW and spend our taxpayer money on restoring our economy from the ground up and establishing a single payer health care system that goes into effect on January 1, 2010.

Afghanistan is the 800 pound gorilla trashing our nation’s finances and it’s long past time to put him to sleep.

I’ve always viewed 9/11 as blowback resulting from US policies and actions. And things like “Two atrocities in the past week” will lead to more blowback, which leads to more war and killing more civilians, which leads to more blowback, which leads to…

I’m glad people see the Vietnam parallel. In 2003 people were telling us, ‘oh no this is very different from Nam’. I protested the Vietnam war, and this WOT has felt like a rerun since 2002.

The shock of 9/11 is different. Other differences are designed to reduce public resistance to the war: no draft, more government control over media, US Casualties lower with more reliance on air power – which predictably kills a lot of civilians leading to even more blowback. Attempting to legalize systematic torture is different – talk about blowback, it’s been considered the number 1 recruitment tool for terrorists.

But it’s mostly a re-run of criminal, immoral US aggression supported by most of the leaders of both political parties, with horrible civilian and military death and suffering, while stupidly draining resources needed for our people and enriching the corporations that feed on it and pervert our politics.

Hey, I never suggested that Afghanistan could have decent elections. It was the U.S. government and Nato allies that did that. So don’t blame the messenger.

Sorry I couldn’t be around when this was top of the stairs, but a lot of good comments here.

@10- SanderO, that is priceless. Yes, “DoD is too big to fail!” But the country is not??

@13 – Frank, I understand and got the snark to begin with

@17 – Teddy, I’m with you: TROOPS HOME NOW

@20 – Is that all you can say?

@22 – Brilliant observation

It is strange to see how this country has morphed into Victorian Britain in its attitude towards “The lesser breeds without the law”. Who will be our Kipling to commemorate the deeds of our soldiers?

Maybe it will be William Anderson. Many here perhaps did not see my article at The Public Record, Former Top Gitmo Psychiatrist Called For Extermination of “Muslim Zealots”. Here’s a sampling of the new Kipling (and apologies to R. Kipling, who was never as bad as this):

A Harvard lecturer and former chief of neuropsychiatry at Guantanamo Bay made the shocking claim in a 2004 article that 100,000 “zealots” within the Muslim body politic would have to be exterminated, the way the “treatment of cancer requires killing of the malignant cells.”

The article, “Terrorism – The Underlying Causes,” appeared in the Winter/Spring 2004 issue of the Intelligencer, Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies, house organ for the American Federation of Intelligence Officers (AFIO), and was written by Dr. William Henry Anderson, who is currently the senior psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Anderson wrote that eliminating “hard-core zealots” is necessary because they have “brains that are structurally and functionally different from us” and there is “no evidence that they can be induced to change their minds.”

@26 – Thanks, Hugh, you said it more succinctly than me.

@28 – Similarly to Shootthatarrow: “Empire by Credit Card”… unsustainable.

Jeff, no it’s not all i can say, but I did want to know what you meant by that. I was hoping for an answer.

Quite simple. I find Obama’s insistence to pursue (escalate) the Afghan war to amount to an obsession, given the reluctance to step back and rethink the entire flawed policy inherited from Bush. I find this “strange,” in the sense all obsessions are strange. Maybe more strange in that Obama appears to be someone who tries to think things through logically.

There’s no logic in the U.S. Afghan policy, unless you buy into the whole “war on terror” business. And it’s clear Obama does. I find that strange, since this obsession with war to kill terrorists abroad is destroying the very country it claims it is insistent on saving (I mean the U.S. here). Sure the destruction is slow, almost Roman Empire-like (thank you WSJ), and mostly due to siphoning off national capital on empire abroad and ignoring building up superstructure at home.

I can also say thank you for answering.
If he tried to think it through, and certainly had quite a few of the foreign policy advisors on his campaign staff spend a lot of time and energy on it before advising him to continue the war, I’m not convinced about “obsession” , but I don’t really know the term.
Again, thanks.

Chris Floyd has a superb piece over at Empire Burlesque about the insanity of Afghanistan War.Here’s a snippet:

…”Meanwhile, Tom Englehardt provides us with some chilling metrics of the monstrosity in “Afghanistan by the Numbers: Measuring a War Gone to Hell.” He marshals an array of thoroughly sourced facts to paint a damning picture of where we are now in Afghanistan — in free fall toward the fiery pit. Read the whole thing — and know rage and despair.

These are remarkably grim days; remarkable to watch a government commiting the same awful crimes, making the same murderous mistakes, displaying the same brutal arrogance and sheer pig-ignorance that we have seen over and over and over again, decade after decade.
Every story out of Afghanistan reads like a dispatch from the botch and butchery in Korea, or the blundering frenzy in Vietnam, or the still-boiling bloodbath in Iraq. No lesson is ever learned from these depraved episodes, save one: empire means money and power for the few — so do whatever the hell you have to do to climb into that golden circle and stay there.”

“Metrics of Monstrosity” Chris Floyd,Empire Burlesque(link to follow)

Metrics of Monstrosity: Free Falling in AfghanistanSep 9, 2009 … Chris Floyd – Empire Burlesque – High Crimes and Low Comedy in the American Imperium.
chris-floyd.com/…/1836-metrics-of-monstrosity-free-falling-in-afghanistan.html -

God, I love how Chris can chew up the rhetorical scenery, and be right all at the same time! Thanks for the link.

To macaquerman @38, you’re welcome.

Anything in it about the clueless clownishness of comparisons that are certainly superficial?

G,night.

DavidByron, do you remember when Eric Shinseki was the darling of the anti-war movement because he told the truth in the run-up to the War in Iraq. I agreed, you probably agreed (I don’t know but I presume you opposed the Iraq War?). Do you remember what he actually said? To occupy Iraq with a population of 16 million (at the time, UNDP figures), would require a force of 300,000 to 350,000 troops. Occupation of territory is defined as effective military, economic, and political control on a routine day by day basis. Using Eric Shinseki’s figures, the population of Afghanistan being about 32 million, would therefore require 600,000 to 700,000 troops. Do you have figures that any where near that many foreign troops are in Afghanistan? Then how can you contend they are under “hostile foreign military occupation?” There are international law definitions of occupation, they are stated in terms of territory, not nations. The U.S. has locations in Afghanistan it is occupying, as do many other nations. They are not occupying the country, nor do they run it. They exercise a lot of clout with the government there, but they do not exercise day to day government.

By all means, have whatever opinions you like about what should be done about Afghanistan by the U.S. and the other 40 countries with troops or services there, and the UN agencies, and the ICRC delegations, and the NGOs and the 60+ donor nations. But don’t propagate phrases like “military occupation” or the other one “brutal invasion” (which also did not occur). They are propaganda, since they are not supported by fact. Regardless of anyone’s point of view on Afghanistan, if it is a sincere and reasoned point of view, it should not mind the application of fact.

In point of fact, the U.S. cannot unilaterally withdraw all of its troops (it can withdraw, but must negotiate that in NATO). Also, if you think that would remove foreign influence from the region, none of the development organizations would go anywhere, nor will watchdog groups. And if you think peace would break out all over in that region with foreign withdrawal, you are seriously kidding yourself. If you even think it is possible for the U.S. to order the withdrawal of all “nation building” people from Afghanistan, you are likewise kidding yourself, as nobody from some of the organizations will budge with millions of refugees and IDPs and an active war in around 1/3 of the country, a still tattered economy and weak organs of state and local government. Many of them will continue to work on those problems, many have been there since 1978, and do not have the mandate in their charters to leave when they think too big a mess has been made.

obama’s vietnam afghanistan

we failed to learn our lessons in nam so maybe we will learn them with iraq and afghanistan

dont bet on it most americans still think they can do no wrong

watched a show on nam tonight and every soldier was proud of the vietnamese they killed and wanted to kill more to win that war

we are a war mongering country and dont have a clue we are

even most demos are imperialists

nation building will have a price bankruptcy

there now few realize it

the end result bye bye middle class

Excellent post, Jeff.

Thank you.

DW

Obama’s Blackwater? Chicago Mercenary Firm Gets Millions for …Apr 2, 2009 … Federal records obtained by AlterNet reveal a multi-million dollar contract for a private US paramilitary force operating out of Jerusalem.
http://www.alternet.org/…/obama…..and_iraq_/ – Cached – Similar

NOTE: This is an article about a firm called Triple Canopy. There will be a LOT of talk about this firm in the very near future.