By Steve Hynd
Via Kat, some excellent comment from Simon Jenkins at the UK's Guardian:
Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain's borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?
Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe's "failure of political will" in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a "two-tier alliance" between those willing to wage war and those "who specialise in 'soft' humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks". Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.
...There is no strategic defence justification for the US spending 5.5% of its gross domestic product on defence or Britain 2.5%, or for the Nato "target" of 2%.
Read, as they say, the whole thing. There really is no justification for such massive defense spending. Al Qaeda certainly does not provide any such rationale. At most, a collection of fundie nutters who number less than one American brigade worldwide provides justification for increased spending on international law enforcement and aid. We're already spending more than enough on the military end of counter-terrorism.
Most of the foreign policy establishment in America agrees with Gates, perhaps unsurprising when most of their jobs - even the supposedly progressive ones - are reliant on money from the military-industrial complex. The notion that the best response is not always military intervention occurs to too few of the VSPs. And once military intervention has begun, no matter how badly it is going, almost all agree that America must be seen to "win" and to be the "good guy". An alternative simply doesn't compute for almost all those "inside the beltway" insiders.
Which brings me to Ambassador Eikenberry's lashing out at Afghanistan's Karzai:
�When Americans, who are serving in your country at great cost � in terms of life and treasure � hear themselves compared with occupiers, told that they are only here to advance their own interest, and likened to the brutal enemies of the Afghan people,� the ambassador said, �they are filled with confusion and grow weary of our effort here.�
...�When we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse, and our generous aid programs dismissed as totally ineffective and the source of all corruption, our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on,� Mr. Eikenberry said.
What effort exactly? What's the mission? We keep being told it's not nation building, oh no, but to fight 100 or so goatherders with guns. To that end we have invaded and overthrown a government; billeted over 100,000 troops on Afghan soil; entered into a protracted guerilla war with a goodly section of the Afghan population (the Taliban are not foreigners); killed civilians and tried to cover those deaths up; dictated policy to Afghanistan's people; backed our own proxies in a drug war; and recruited tens of thousands of Afghans into auxilliary adjuncts to our forces, to be used as cannon fodder.
Oh, and it's not just Karzai who thinks the US' military-biassed, scattergun approach to aid has fuelled corruption in Afghanistan. A two-year study by the US Senate Foreign relations Committee thinks so too.
Recent U.S. government reports suggest that the Obama administration instead doubled down on a flawed strategy, pouring large sums into projects that have fueled corruption, distorted local economies and left Afghanistan with technology it won't be able to maintain after NATO forces leave.
The bipartisan Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan said in a report this month that "overly ambitious proposals, incomplete analysis, poor planning, weak coordination and inadequate follow-through by federal officials" risked wasting billions more.
So what would you call it, if not an occupation, Ambassador?
The giant corporations, have all the money and they call all of the shots. Huge gas and oil company's thrive on wars. There must always be a war going somewhere, if not, invent one. Iraq was accused of having WMD, even if they knew Iraq didn't.
ReplyDeleteWikileaks has said, the N.A.U. is just around the corner. The U.S. was just waiting for P.M. Harper, to win his majority. The N.A.U. will start in small increments at first. The entire globe, will be sectioned off in Unions. The giant corporations, will be The New World Order. Global Governance has been worked on, since 1945. Some one else had a plan for a New World Order, only he called it, The Thousand year Reich.
Once politicians allowed corruption in their ranks, our country's ended up, being owned by the very corporations, they took the money from. The giant corporations, hoard all the money. This stops the cash flow around the globe. This causes a recession, and the big boys get even more control. Same as, the gasoline company's hoard the gas to cause a shortage. That forces the price of gas up.
We certainly can count on, many more bombs being bought. There are wars, and rumors of wars. Count on it.
I had written a long now for me response agreeing with you and bemoaning our current situation as cuckolds in our own democracies. Then by accident I found Sylvia Plath amongst my iTunes files reading the Thin People and strangely though, she long dead, said more than my mouthing. Link to her reading her poem [via my ifile thingy eh]:
ReplyDeletehttp://ifile.it/7pglora
She, all nonsense aside, has a beautiful voice don't you think? Yes I think she does and not like what most think her.