Time for Obama to be Tough on Banksters not in Afghanistan

Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the US military nor the US government can afford to waste.

Andrew Bacevich, former US Colonel, Professor of history at Boston University

NY Times columnist, Bob Herbert, told Obama as soon as he began his new job over a year ago that “the US military is worn out from years of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan”:

The troops are stressed from multiple deployments. Equipment is in disrepair. Budgets are beyond strained. Sending thousands of additional men and women—some to die, some to be horribly wounded—on a fool’s errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness.

He thought Obama may feel he had to demonstrate his toughness, and that Afghanistan was the place to do it. It seems that is just what Obama felt. The US is still in there with more troops than ever!

Obama could show his own courage as commander in chief by quitting this absurd war. Dwight D Eisenhower, a Republican president, was not ashamed to say, “I hate war”. Eisenhower described “its brutality, its futility, its stupidity”, and could say it in defiance of his redneck supporters, having lived and breathed a proper war for four long years (1941-1945) against a real army, Hitler’s German army of well equipped and battle hardened troops. In Afghanistan, Obama wants to prove his courage against a rag, tag and bobtail army of farmers and peasants, brave but ill-equipped with largely home made weapons, whose defenseless wives and children cower in mud huts being bombed and shot at by well equipped and battle hardened soldiers, who are our own!

And what is Obama achieving? He is driving angry men into Pakistan, a nuclear power, plainly destabilizing it and threatening to make it a failed state whose natural enemy rather than natural friend would be the US, and its spineless allies in the west.

No country poses a greater potential threat to US national security—today and for the foreseeable future—than Pakistan. To risk the stability of that nuclear armed state in the vain hope of salvaging Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake.

Professor Colonel A Bacevich

It is absurd to attempt to restrict potential terrorists by occupying a large and mountainous country. It should not need the spending of countless tax dollars when we face far more dangerous crooks, robbers and terrorists at home sitting behind the desks of Goldmann Sachs executives, and those of other infallible banks. The banks have become a fetid hothouse of corruption, a haven of gangsters and weasels whose salute is the upturned palm. Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, our banks are shot through with corruption and graft. They are no longer offering a public service for which they want a fair return, but exist only for the enrichment of those who run them.

Are our soldiers putting lives on the line for the corruption of banksters, Like Richard Fuld, and political monsters like Richard Cheney?—described now as the two Dicks!

Let us kill two birds with one stone by putting the desk clerk crooks and slime bag politicians in uniform and sending them to Afghanistan. US prospects might not be so good in Afghanistan, but they will be much improved at home.

Impeach the War Criminals

When American POWs were shown on TV by the Iraqis, Donald (von) Rumsfeld suddenly became a spouter of international law, the Geneva Convention. Why then was he, and the US leadership not interested in international law when they ignored the rule of the UN and started the war? Are we supposed to admire or believe this hypocrisy? Saddam was not the only criminal. These men were too, and they know it. That is why the US still refuses to ratify the International Court of Justice.

Mr Blair boasted that the removal of Saddam was a good deed in itself, so it did not matter that he lied to Parliament and the country over WMDs. Saddam, he told us killed 300,000 of his own people and they were buried in mass graves, but the invasion led to more deaths, and that is justified in Blair”s perverted mind. In the Vietnam war, Blair’s ally in mutual sycophancy, the USA, had already killed 60,000 of its own soldiers fighting an unjust war, and killed two million Vietnamese, as well as destroying the country with defoliants and poisons, and damaging the genetic make up of the Vietnamese forever with horrific results. What does the selective Christian conscience say about all this?

Bush was not elected but twice defrauded the US electorate to get into power. Yet, the people of the US seem unabashed that this man should have led their sons into a mad adventure on the basis of hatred of Moslems, or greed for oil. The call among peace loving and democratic people now is to punish the crypto-Nazis and strengthen the democratic process so that the same disaster cannot happen again.

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Impeach the war criminals Bush and Blair.

A Better way of Organising our Politics

Something is profoundly wrong, with the way we live today.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

We have wasted the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have been consumed by the locusts, or more precisely by the shamelessly greedy. It has been the era of all the Dicks, from Cheney to Fuld, politically “an age of the pygmies”. Unregulated markets have crashed. Wars of choice have left bloody destruction in their wake. The snouts have been buried deep in the trough. Beyond the noise of guzzling, we can hear no moral critique of what has happened, no shout of rage that things don’t have to be like this.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed, not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt… encourages dissent from conformity, for which there is much to be said. Blessed are the troublemakers.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

[But] social democracy is not something that Americans can talk about, though there is a bit of cognitive dissonance about their attitudes to the public and private realms of social provision… [In the first thirty years after the War] planning, progressive taxation, high public spending and nationalized services brought inclusive economic growth with increasing equity and social harmony. A mostly benign state provided the security for which people yearn, replacing the market’s invisible hand with more visible supportive direction. Maybe all was not for the best, but it was pretty good all the same—and would have gladdened the heart of that scion of egalitarian Eton, John Maynard Keynes… According to Judt, since the 1980s, from Reagan to Bush, from Thatcher to Brown, it has been downhill all the way, with growing inequity, a declining belief in the role of the state and a falling away from civic engagement.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt is proudly a man of the left… He is intellectually brave—witness his well founded criticisms of Israel’s policies in Palestine. Beyond the imaginings of most of us, Judt is personally brave, too; motor neurone disease has left him quadriplegic.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

From The UK Observer

Dick Cheney Supports Waterboarding. Does God?

Paradigms Lost at True Slant reports that in an interview with the Republican ex-vice President, Dick Cheney answered in the style we have come to expect of him. He said he questioned whether “this guy” is taking the war on terror seriously. The Religious Right always know what God wants, so it seems unbelievable to hear words of frustration:

“At the same time that American is engaged in a global fight against terror, in which thousands of American lives are at stake, God seems more concerned with setting snowfall records along the Eastern seaboard. Personally, I long for the days of fire and brimstone.”

God is not doing enough to fight terror, and he longed for the Rapture, the days when God let His will be known.

“I was a big advocate of waterboarding. I was a big advocate of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

God is not supportive. Asked, “Didn’t Jesus say ‘love your enemies’? So torture in not at all Christian!”, Cheney replied:

“No one was tortured during the Bush Administration, but that doesn’t mean we should stop doing it because it is absolutely essential in the war against terror.”

David Knowles at Paradigm Lost reports he repeatedly went after God. Mr Cheney approved of rescinding the military’s controversial “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, but said it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that his own daughter is a lesbian.

Asked whether the same logic held true for interrogating prisoners, seeing that the Bush administration overturned the Army field manual when it authorized the use of torture on enemy combatants, Mr Cheney’s reported reply was:

“Why don’t you ask God that question?”

Cheney has never got over no longer pulling God’s strings as he used to when he controlled Bush in the Whitehouse, a man who thought he was God. A former member of the Bush team said its like he wants God to fail, but it’s just Dick being Dick! Or was it a dick?

Paradigms Lost was unable to get God for a comment. Of course, they might be joking!