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.

Logistics in Afghanistan

There's Gold - er... Lithium In Them Thar Obamanamistan Hills !!!????

The real reason for Operation Enduring Freedom emerges after our American prospectors have sacrificed squandered their blood for eight (8) years in this barren and remote land.

Well if it's not gold, maybe it's lithium. Or maybe it's bauxite. Igneous-related lead and zinc?

Tell me Reader(s), if we weren't there already, would we go to Afghanistan for its Clay?

How about its potentially lucrative glass sand & stone quarries?

These newly revealed riches make it more palatable and understandable as to why we have poured the blood of 6,700 American KIA's and WIA's into this rich soil of Afghanistanam? And $400,000,000,000? Is that it?

If we need lithium for our Blackberries, wouldn't be a little cheaper to obtain it the old-fashioned way? By buying it from the Talibanistan corporate government?

Because - bet your ass - that's what we'll be doing in twenty years, whether or not Obama has a second term. Because it's looking like it's like LBJ-deja vu all over again, as Yogi would say.

It was always a bad year to get out of Vietnam, as Daniel Ellsberg says.

The Longest War

Beware of Russian Bears, Bearing Advice (Part II)

Last January, I counseled against taking Russian Advice on Afghanistan too seriously. Yesterday, the Ruskies were again offering their unsolicited advice to members of US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). The occasion was an Asia security conference - an annual forum known as the Shangri-La Dialogue which concluded in Singapore Sunday.

Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov's audience was composed of defense ministers, military officials and scholars. From various news sources I have tried to cobble together enough of his words to reach a semblance of coherency. In the Q & A Ivanov addressed Russian interests which pertained to the export of heroin:

The most popular is the northern route. It's rather easy to cross the Afghan-Tajik border. As soon as you cross the Afghan-Tajik border, it's easy to move it to Moscow, to London, to Paris, to Berlin, to elsewhere.... A lot should be done in just starting very primitive social-economic life in Afghanistan. If we don’t do that, any military presence would be in vain.... the duty rests those who took responsibility for ensuring peace and stability in Afghanistan..... By the way, next year I think the ISAF will break the Soviet record of the duration of stay in Afghanistan...

I can't give advice, particularly publicly .... I have to confess... meeting American defense secretaries, central intelligence chiefs, state department chiefs, we discussed it ...If we are asked, we answer, but it's difficult to comment publicly, really difficult. We are already helping a lot in ISAF operations in Afghanistan, providing logistic support, transport support, intelligence support -- whatever.

Except one thing: Never again a Russian soldier would enter Afghanistan. I think you understand why. It's like asking the United States whether they will send troops to Vietnam.

It's something like that. It's totally impossible.

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, which lasted from from 1979-1989, cost over 13,000 Soviet lives and contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Give POTUS a Chance

Today's local paper contains an article by Maureen Dowd in which she rakes President Obama over the coals for losing control "of his own narrative".

She praises "...the passion, lyricism, empathy and exquisite understanding of character and psychological context" that he shows in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, but then states that it is these very qualities that  "...he has stubbornly resisted showing as president."  

I am not completely happy myself with some of President Obama's behaviors as President - for example, his continuing efforts to placate and pander to Republican'ts who only want to obstruct, not to engage constructively in seeking solutions to the disastrous financial, military, ecological, legal, disasters ensuing from the Busheney years,

But given the number and ferocity of the many fires threatening our nation's very survival which he inherited, I believe is doing the very best that he can.  His attempts to bind up the nations' overwhelming number of grievous wounds inflicted upon us by Busheney and the Stepford-wives-Republican'ts, deserve our appreciation and our gratitude. 

In addition to all his many efforts to right the nation's Ship of State, President Obama is being subjected to nonstop personal attacks and criticism (just and unjust) from all sides.  I admire his strength of character that permits him to get out of bed and go to work every day.  It cannot be easy to live with such a constant barrage of innuendo, outright made-up lies, and snarky character assassination as he is subjected to on a daily basis.

It is easy to criticize; it is not easy to seek solutions to thorny problems that require real adults who actually care about helping solve America's problems more than they care about scoring political points.    It is impossible to heal our broken government when there is no desire or willingness from the members of the minority political party to do anything other than obstruct, defame, and destroy.

Today's "Opposition Party" is just exactly that - not a "Loyal Opposition Party", but an obstructive oppositional ideologically driven unitary political party bent on destroying our President, the middle class, and our Constitution - so that they can complete their goal of establishing the corporatist theocratic kingdom they envision.

Accidental Acuity

I don't know who Bob Somerly is. Know nothing about him except to say he is not universally loved by those I unconditionally love. But I do think he nailed something to the oak when he wrote this in the Daily Howler:

Indeed, the liberal world is increasingly adopting the core values of the mainstream press corps. We run on silly sexy-time tales, and on invented lies by opponents. This is low-IQ tabloid work, pure and simple—and it’s a culture which will never serve progressive interests. By the way: This is the culture of the mainstream press—the punishing culture with which the mainstream chased down, first Clinton, then Gore. ... Will progressive interests ever prosper within such a brain-dead culture? We strongly doubt it...

Anyone who elbows Rachel Maddow is not my guru. But these lines constitute a credible signpost marking the highways and byways of our descent a from the city on the hill: had to save them from being covered by the ongoing ooze of American crude.