30,000 more for an ill-conceived and never-ending land war in Asia?
Mike9
support troops to Afghanistan.
And we all thought we elected a peace=anti-war president!
A man who could think out of the box and come up with a breakthrough
solution for peace.
From Time.com 10-28-2009: 3 paragraphs:
**************************
Yet eight years of war with no end in sight leaves other military
experts vexed. "Having to a great extent captured, killed and
seriously disrupted the al-Qaeda leadership and training
infrastructure in Afghanistan, the necessity, and therefore the
strategy for this war, has gotten away from us," Air Force Major
Jeremy Kotkin, a strategist with the U.S. Special Operations Command,
wrote on Aug. 31 in Small Wars Journal, an independent
counterinsurgency blog. "We have transferred the consequence of the
very real threat of al-Qaeda to the Taliban, to fields of Afghan
poppies, and to the political and economic shambles that was and is
Afghanistan." Such mission creep, he says, has made the nation's task
in Afghanistan far tougher than originally intended.
Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, says the drone strikes are
paying off in Pakistan because of that nation's "quasi-legitimate
government and reasonably effective army" — neither of which
Afghanistan has. "So I don't think we can say the methods employed in
Pakistan are the right template for Afghanistan." But he does call the
war "misguided and unnecessary" and says the U.S. should work with the
country's tribal chiefs to ensure stability in their respective
valleys. And offshore spy-and-strike capabilities could, at a minimum,
keep al-Qaeda off balance in the region "and optimally destroy
whatever entity is engaged in a plot."
Beyond such tactical issues, Bacevich, who served in Vietnam, is
baffled by the willingness of today's U.S. Army officers to engage in
a never-ending counterinsurgency. "If you're in my generation, it is
simply extraordinary that we now have an officer corps that accepts
protracted, morally ambiguous warfare as its destiny," says Bacevich,
now a professor at Boston University. "They have embraced this as the
new American way of war, heedlessly, thoughtlessly and — in terms of
what the larger interests of the country require — very foolishly."
Obama will be weighing precisely those larger interests in the days
ahead.
**********************************
Will Barack Obama now become the next Lyndon Johnson = war president
=
a 4-year failure, or will he have the audacity and courage to work a
miracle=
peace? We are waiting anxiously and we still have hope but we are not
expecting anything good or even promising. The US warmaking machine
(industrial-military complex) with its bought politicians is just too
powerful and too wedded to illegal and thus criminal killing and
destruction
in foreign countries eight thousand miles away from our shores.
And all that for oil, gas, pipelines and military bases in two of the
richest resource areas of the world. The reasons why are clear.
Michael McKinley
lo yeeOn
Mike9 <m9mck...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Obama's coming decision may include sending 30,000 more soldiers and
>support troops to Afghanistan.
>And we all thought we elected a peace=anti-war president!
>A man who could think out of the box and come up with a breakthrough
>solution for peace.
So, we thought wrong. The lesson is there exists a government dogma
about the sanctity of its foreign policy, no matter how it was first
introduced and no matter how ugly and how wrong it is, to which newly
elected officials would all pledge to uphold. It, for all practical
purposes, is known as continuity of _the_ government.
It means that George Bush's foreign policy of _world domination_ by
means of forces continues, whether a democrat or a republican ends up
succeeding him. The candidates can say things the electorate wants to
hear; but in the end, they will do the same thing to please their real
boss, who is never _the people_.
I remember Ted Koppel reported that candidate Hillary Clinton assured
a high official in the Pentagon quietly that she would leave tens of
thousands of US troops in Iraq even by the end of her second term as
president should she be elected to the office. She never squared it
with the voters as she would have her campaign manager tell the press
time and time again that her Iraqi policy remains the same: bring the
troops home from Iraq.
Though it is Obama instead of Clinton now as president, there remains
tens of thousands of troops in Iraq.
People who tried to elect the one who they perceived to be the most
likely to end the wars were hoping for the best and they have been
once more betrayed. The Nobel Peace committee was also hoping for the
best by banking on Obama, hoping he would effect a change of the state
of the world: from a war-torn one to a peaceful one. But it will also
be disappointed.
Democracy be damned for the American people. The Establishment has
its own idea of what America should be. And peace and freedom for the
world be damned. America's political establishment has its own idea
of security interest, always unconcerned about the blood of its
citizens, much less that of the people in countries it has decided to
invade and forcibly occupy.
Politicians always sell their souls. They are seasoned enough to know
that to get inside the power structure in D.C., they have to first
pledge allegiance to its sacrosanct foreign policy first.
They know otherwise they would not be invited in by the Establishment
which effectively maintains control over the country's military and
the treasury of the country. The Establishment controls the
propaganda channell of the country. If you're not an acceptable one
to those inside the Establishment. Your would be destroyed in a day
when some report surfaces and make sure you don't see the light of
another day. That's how power in this country works, essentially.
People power? No such thing! Democracy in America is a farce.
lo yeeOn
========