Obama is a Useful Idiot for the Military-Industrial Complex

Over the past decade of the Bush-Obama administration, Paul Craig Roberts has blown hot and cold for me. But, in the matter of McChrystal firing charade, Roberts is compellingly true as the noon day sun when he asks: Is Petraeus McChrystal’s Replacement or Obama’s?

As always, Roberts goes a wee bit too far on the hyperbolic scale for my tastes so I'll try to be discreet about how much I quote with approval:

....Generals have to fight wars that civilians start, either from the incompetence of their diplomacy or the arrogance of their hubris. Generals have to get young troops killed because of the stupidity or ambition or corruption of civilian government officials.

.... McChrystal didn’t restart America’s aggression against Afghanistan ....

People elected Obama, because they were tired of Bush’s wars based on lies. So Obama ... re-ignited the Afghan war. No one knows what these wars are about or why the bankrupt US government is wasting vast sums of money, which it has to borrow from foreigners, in order to murder the citizenry in two countries that have never done anything to us.

Just as Bush/Cheney and their criminal neocon government deceived the world that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened white people everywhere, Obama has conflated the Taliban with al Qaeda. Obama has sold the tale to white NATO countries that unless the US determines how Afghanistan is ruled and by whom, white people are in danger of being exterminated by al Qaeda Taliban terrorists.

The most telling aspect of the McChrystal-Obama contretemps is that it has caused no one in the US government, or media, to ask why the US is still killing women and children in Afghanistan after 9 years ....

Once the Roman senate, the legislative branch, collapsed, the caesars, the executive branch, became the captives of the military. Now with Gen. Petraeus once again moved to the fore as McChrystal’s replacement in Afghanistan, we have the Obama moron elevating Petraeus to the Republican presidential nomination in the next election. Thus has Obama replaced himself with a man who will unify the military and executive branch .....

Petraeus is an evolved form of general. He “won” in Iraq by paying protection money to the Sunnis who were effectively resisting the US occupation. Petraeus figured out that it was far cheaper and more efficient to put the Sunnis on the US military payroll and to pay them to stop fighting, which is how the war between the Sunnis and the Americans ended. To keep the Americans out of the ongoing large scale sectarian violence that continues to slaughter Iraqis, the US military was confined to remote bases.

If history is a guide, the Afghans will also accept Petraeus’ protection money, and Petraeus has just enough time to buy the Afghan war before the next presidential election.

The Afghans will, of course, take the money and wait us out, just as the Iraqis are doing.

All of this drama is playing out despite the continuing lack of any valid reason for the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Washington idiots, trying to dictate how Iraq and Afghanistan are governed, are destroying constitutional government in the United States. In our hubris to determine how Iraq and Afghanistan are ruled, we are losing our own government.

There you have it. What better evidence do you need than these two statements from opposite ends of the tweedle-dee/tweedle-dum spectrum?

First from Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein we can see which way civilian-military relationships are evolving:

If he can't work with the ambassador, the ambassador should be changed. If he can't work with Holbrooke, that should change. ... I think we put all our eggs in the Petraeus basket.

Neocon William Kristol agrees:

Let us now praise Barack Obama... The only thing Obama could have done to more dramatically minimize the significance of the July 2011 date would have been explicitly to repudiate it. He should do that, and in a few months he may.

History will record that the American dream started its transition into an American nightmare during the Bush-Obama epoch.