Obama:Another Fucking War President

Obama: Another Fucking War President
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posted Wednesday, 30 September 2009

Obama: Another Fucking War President
The Neocons Are Back: "Attack Iran!"
Forty Million Americans Are Living in Poverty

"I Love My Troops"
America's 'Defense' Industry Needs
Its Products to Be Consumed
Thus, Endless War
Obama vowed to continue Bush's war policies in Afghanistan. He has more than doubled the number of US troops and aircraft. Obama's eagerness to expand the war demonstrates his political inexperience and a faulty grasp of events in Afghanistan.
A change of administration in Washington, and departure of the reviled Bush, offered an ideal opportunity for Washington to declare a pause in the Afghan War and reassess its policies.
It also presented an ideal opportunity to offer negotiations to Taliban and its growing number of supporters.
The Afghan War will have to be ended by a political settlement that includes the Taliban-led nationalist alliance that represents over half of Afghanistan's population, the Pashtun people.
There is simply no purely military solution to this grinding conflict - as even the Secretary General of NATO admits.
But instead of diplomacy, the new administration elected to stick its head ever deeper into the Afghan hornet's nest. The bill for an intensified war has now reached $4 billion monthly.
This at a time when the United States is bankrupt and running on borrowed money from China and Japan.
The 20,000 to 30,000 more US troops slated to go to Afghanistan will also be standing on a smoking volcano: Pakistan.
The Afghan War is relentlessly seeping into Pakistan, enflaming its people against the NATO powers and, as Lord West rightly says, generating new jihadist forces.
Polls show most Pakistanis strongly oppose the US-led war in Afghanistan and the grudging involvement of their armed forces in it. Intensifying US air attacks on Pakistan have aroused fierce anti-American sentiment across this nation of 165 million.
Why is President Obama, who came to power on an anti-war platform, committed to expanding a war where there are no vital US interests?
Oil is certainly one reason. The proposed route for pipelines taking oil and gas from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea coast runs right through Taliban-Pashtun territory.
Another reason: Americans still want revenge for 9/11. In the absence of a clear perpetrator, the Taliban has been selected as the most convenient and identifiable target though it had nothing to do with the attacks and knew nothing about them.
The 9/11 attacks were mounted from Germany and Spain, not Afghanistan, and planned by a group of Pakistanis. Washington has yet to offer a White Paper promised in 2001 'proving' the guilt of Osama bin Laden in the attacks.
There is also the less obvious question of NATO. Washington arm-twisted the reluctant NATO alliance badly for the US-led forces as their vulnerable supply lines come increasingly under Taliban attack.
Here in Europe, the majority of public opinion opposes the Afghanistan War as a neo-colonial adventure for oil and imperial influence.
The US could survive a defeat in Afghanistan, as it did in Vietnam. But the NATO alliance might not.
The end of the Cold War and collapse of the USSR removed the raison d'être from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization which was created to resist Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
According to Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America's leading strategists, NATO serves as the primary tool for America's strategic domination of Europe. Japan fulfills the same role for the US in Asia. The Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact to dominate Eastern Europe.
The US also uses NATO to help deter the creation of a truly united - and rival - Europe with its own unified armed forces. The EU will not become a truly integrated national state until it has its own independent armed forces.
NATO's defeat in Afghanistan would raise questions about its continuing purpose and obedience to US strategic demands.
Calls would inevitably come for empowerment of the European Defense Union, an independent European armed force that answers to the EU in Brussels, not to Washington.
This, I believe, is one of the primary reasons why vested interests in Washington - notably the Pentagon - have prevailed on the new president to expand the war in Afghanistan by claiming that America's influence in Europe depends on victory in Afghanistan.
The US and its allies cannot be seen to be defeated by a bunch of Afghan tribesmen.
Coming after the epic defeat in Vietnam and the trillion dollar fiasco in Iraq, defeat in Afghanistan is simply unthinkable to the military-industrial-petroleum-financial complex.
The last empire that suffered defeat at the hands of the Afghans, the once mighty Soviet Union, quickly fell apart. Washington has clearly taken this dire lesson to heart.
tags: afghanistan war president obama