Monday, February 02, 2009

Obama in Afghanistan



Some of the wounded lay where they fell, waiting for what they knew would come. For others, a comradely shot to the head was thought humane. Rudyard Kipling captured the essence of the terrible decision:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,

An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

That was January 1842. A British army of 5,000 troops and 12,000 civilians left Kabul, Afghanistan in a mad retreat to Jalalabad. As the Afghanis cut them to pieces, chaos prevailed among the British soldiers who, it is reported, knocked down their officers with the butts of their muskets. On the 13th of January, just seven days after the retreat commenced, one man, bloody and torn, mounted on a miserable pony, and pursued by horsemen, was seen riding furiously across the plains. The other 17,000 lay dead on the snowy ground.

Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Alexander the Great, Moghuls, the British, and the Soviet Union were all driven from Afghanistan.

The United States now has 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. It’s Bush’s war. “We are on the verge of significantly expanding the war in Afghanistan,” Ray Bonner wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “which will inevitably affect Pakistan as well. Unfortunately, there has been little or no debate about President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to send in more troops,” Bonner concluded. When he does that, when Obama escalates the war by sending in 20,000 more troops, on that day it will be Obama’s war.

Why is the United States in Afghanistan? Contrary to the propaganda of the Bush and now Obama administrations, as Bonner points out, “the threat presented by Al Qaeda has been exaggerated.” Al Qaeda’s “importance in the general scheme of things is greatly overstated by the West,” Tariq Ali writes in his new book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power. Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst and adviser to three presidents, “acknowledges that enlarging the war in Afghanistan is exactly what Al Qaeda wants, just as it wants the conflict in Iraq to continue. ‘In its view,’ Riedal says, the bleeding wars offer the best opportunity to defeat the United States’.”

Have we learned nothing from history? Does no one remember that Osama bin Laden is a creation of the United States? Does no one remember that some of the weapons he now uses on U. S. soldiers were supplied to him through the largess of Congressmen Norm Dicks and Charlie Wilson?

After seven years of war and occupation, Afghanistan is a failed, narco-state. It has a puppet president whose authority does not extend beyond Kabul. He depends for his survival on NATO and U. S. mercenaries. It has, according to Ali, “a corrupt and abusive police force, a nonfunctioning judiciary, a burgeoning criminal layer and a deepening social and economic crisis.”

Sounds to me a lot like Vietnam under U.S. tutelage in the 1950s and 1960s. I hope Obama does not go down this road, to compound the tragedy we have already induced.. 

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's

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posted by Gary Murrell's What's Left @ 5:04 PM

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Thursday, January 15, 2009

Empire or Not

 write in response to Jim Mason, et al, who responded to my Dec. 28 letter to the editor.

As usual, most of the people who respond to my letter either in print or on-line refused to deal with the argument I put forward and instead resorted to ad hominem attack. To answer several people who responded on the Daily World Web site, anonymously of course, I served in the United States Air Force from 1966 to 1970.

Mr. Mason writes that my letter was “beyond reason, … hateful, disrespectful rubbish.” Sorry sir, but that is not an argument.

I wrote not to deny any wounded soldier comfort, as Mr. Mason claimed, but out of my concern for all U.S. soldiers overseas and the thousands who will be sent tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow unless we break our love of militarism, our lust for hegemony and our absolute rejection of decency and reality.

I remember when the movie, “Star Wars,” came out how we all rooted for Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leah. They were the “good guys” battling the storm-troopers of the empire. Today, we are the empire and we have turned our young men and women who volunteered for the military into the empire’s storm-troopers. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. We created Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, financed his operations and supplied him with the weapons that he and others now turn against U.S. forces. Iraq did not attack the United States. Saddam was our thug in the 1980s when he waged war against Iran. The people in both those countries who fight to repel the forces that invaded and occupy their countries have the right and the duty, under international law, to do so.

The United States Congress did not declare war as required by the Constitution. Bush lied. Cheney lied. Rice. Powell and Rumsfeld lied. Those men and women who volunteered for the military did not sign up to serve as storm-troopers for the emperor and his minions. In service to the empire our soldiers have slaughtered hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan, tortured prisoners in both those countries and elsewhere, and all the while we have turned our gaze away from the brutality that our military wages in our name.

These war crimes have nothing to do with what Mr. Mason and others have called “protecting our freedom.” Quite the contrary, these wars and the actions taken within the United States by our government, Republicans and Democrats, have reduced and endangered our freedoms: Habeas Corpus, gone; the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments shredded; Citizens spied on with impunity.

That sir is not protecting our freedoms. Our descent into empire is destroying our freedoms.




To make all these matters worse, parents in this country are grooming their own children for the slaughter and slaughtering in years to come. Our schools have become testing grounds for hero (certainly an overused word by now) worship. No longer are Han Solo and Luke Skywalker and Princess Leah, who resisted Darth Vader and the emperor, heroes. Now the imperial storm-troopers themselves are the heroes as they smash and murder their way across the globe — at sea, on the ground and in the air.

Students are encouraged to write happy holiday letters to the “heroes protecting our freedoms.” Recruiters roam the halls of our schools baiting their nets.

Next year and the next and the next, when Clinton or Bush or Obama or whomever calls for more troops in service of the empire, our young people will march off, cheered on by their teachers, recruiters and parents, to kill in undeclared and illegal wars.

I’d like to see those young people educated and productive citizens rather than killed and killing in service to the empire.

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posted by Gary Murrell's What's Left @ 6:23 AM

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