1. The 50 Year War:
“Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the Pentagon’s plan for a fifty-year “Long War” of counterinsurgency spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond.
Military intellectuals envision a prolonged cold war against Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way. It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines. The Pentagon identifies them as hostile terrain where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are hidden.
…
These projections reveal a staggering audacity–not Obama’s audacity of hope but an audacity of martial commitment. A fifty- to 100-year military campaign–the subtitle of Kilcullen’s book is Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One–will span thirteen presidential terms and twenty-five Congressional sessions, casting a long shadow over generations of politicians not yet running for office. The Long War assumes either perpetual democratic approval by many voters not yet alive or that democracy will simply be circumvented by the national security state. Bin Laden will be dead of natural causes or otherwise long before it’s over.
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This may be the part where an inbred secrecy ultimately leads to a brilliant but delusional Apocalypse Now sensibility, expressed in the Joseph Conrad character Kurtz’s exclamation “Exterminate all the brutes!” The further tragedy of counterinsurgency is that it does not stop in the face of failure but starts all over again from its own ashes. In the end, its secrets will not be kept from its victims in Afghanistan and Pakistan, who suspect and know all too well who is killing them, but from well-meaning Americans living in our own gated communities amid democratic structures that seem unable to save us from a remote-controlled, engineered ignorance. “
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091102/hayden
2. War criminals shouldn’t influence policy:
“When General McChrystal was first reported as requesting 40,000 additional troops for Afghanistan, many people balked at the massive number. Not long after, the number was quietly revised to 45,000. Last Friday it became clear that the general had actually requested over 60,000.
Now McClatchy Newspapers is citing officials in the Obama Administration and military as saying that the General’s “low-risk” option was actually even higher, asking for 80,000 additional troops for the war in Afghanistan.”
3. “Media Distortion: Killing Innocent Afghan Civilians to “Save Our Troops”
The execution of America’s post-Korean wars in the Third World is all about the differential value of life put on those colored “Others,” in other words, race/ethnicity matters. This can be seen in the language/framing of official discourse, in the language of soldiers, and in outcomes exposing the differential value of life practiced by Americans such as in compensation for wrongful death;
…
Lew Rockwell noted that Americans believe they are the chosen people (expressed in more academic terms as an alleged “American exceptionalism” meaning a belief that the U.S. has a special world historical role to play [12]). Others have argued that the USA suffers from a pathological narcissistic personality disorder. [13] Hence, an American life is higher on the scale of human civilization than say that of an Afghan, Indian or Iraqi. In order to preserve lives of American soldiers a trade-off is implemented: the U.S, military simply relies upon air strikes instead of ground forces as the former entails essentially no risk whereas ground combat in difficult, foreign terrain like Afghanistan is treacherous. In other words, certain Afghan civilian casualties are traded-off for sparing the lives of U.S. ground soldiers. America’s Afghan war has been particularly deadly for innocent civilians.
…
The relative lethality of the U.S-led war in Afghanistan is captured by the ratio of civilians killed to U.S/NATO occupation soldiers killed. The following Table 3 summarizes such data. Over three Afghan civilians died for every occupation soldier killed during 2005-middle of 2009; in other words, the execution of the U.S-led war was more than three times more deadly for innocent Afghans than it was for the aggressor forces. Naturally, the costs of the American-led war far exceed that of civilians killed by US/NATO forces, but time does not allow exploring such here. [15]“
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15665
4. “British High Court rejects U.S./British cover-up of torture evidence
There is a vital development — a new ruling from the British High Court — in a story about which I’ve written many times before: the extraordinary joint British/U.S. effort to cover up the brutal torture which Binyam Mohamed suffered at the hands of the CIA while in Pakistan and while he was “rendered” by the U.S. to various countries.
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All of this highlights two vital points: (1) the extent to which the Obama administration has been willing to go to cover up evidence of the Bush administration’s torture regime; when I interviewed Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, in April, he made clear that these threats were part of a joint cover-up between the U.S. and Britain; and (2) the way in which American citizens are forced to rely on the institutions in foreign countries — British courts and Spanish prosecutors — to learn about what our own government has done. War crimes can never stay hidden for long. It’s only a matter of time before all of this evidence comes out one way or the other, and when it does, those who worked so vigorously to keep it concealed will be rightly judged to have been complicit in its cover-up.
Today’s Guardian calls the Court’s ruling “a devastating judgment,” reporting that the “judges roundly dismissed the foreign secretary’s claims that disclosing the evidence would harm national security and threaten the UK’s vital intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US.” The article also notes that the Court simply did not believe that the Obama administration would follow through on these threats, but instead issued them only at the behest of British officials, who needed a pretext for ongoing concealment.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
5. And yet another fucking war:
“The Nobel Peace Prize-winner’s latest war is largely secret. On 15 July, Washington finalised a deal with Colombia that gives the US seven giant military bases. “The idea,” reported the Associated Press, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations . . . nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refuelling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.
Translated, this means Obama is planning a “rollback” of the independence and democracy that the people of Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Paraguay have achieved against the odds, along with a historic regional co-operation that rejects the notion of a US “sphere of influence”. The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel. Britain provides military training. Guided by US military satellites, Colombian paramilitaries now infiltrate Venezuela with the goal of overthrowing the democratic government of Hugo Chávez, which George W Bush failed to do in 2002.
Obama’s war on peace and democracy in Latin America follows a style he has demonstrated since the coup against the democratic president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, in June. Zelaya had increased the minimum wage, granted subsidies to small farmers, cut back interest rates and reduced poverty. He planned to break a US pharmaceutical monopoly and manufacture cheap generic drugs. “
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23737.htm
