The new Washington Post/ABC poll is on the front page of the paper today (3/15/11):
Nearly two-thirds of Americans now say the war in Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting, the highest proportion yet opposed to the conflict, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll.
The Post‘s write-up includes a lot of strange language about the political situation for the White House: “a growing challenge for President Obama,””a difficult political challenge,””an awkward issue for the president.” A more direct way of putting it would be to say thatObama’s war policy is massively unpopular.
A broader point: No matter how unpopular the Afghan War gets, it never quite seems like the right time to hear very many anti-war voices in the corporate media.
It is truly amazing that Americans are so slow to wake to the crime committed by their sons and daughters on behalf of America’s Corporate Masters.
Perhaps, AFTER their friends and neighbors have joined “The Tax Refusal” they, also, will wake to the crimes being committed against defenseless fellow human beings. AND REFUSE to support a society that would be party to mass murder.
Meanwhile . . enjoy a new view of how “Sentient Beings” should conduct their affairs . . .
Support The Insanity
Support The Insanity
Surrender To Greed
Pay Fools Taxes
Heed Profit’s Creeds
Now Look Around You
Smell The Slime And The Stink
Pay All Taxes Promptly?
Or Learn How To Think?
Copyright August 8, 1997 Daniel J. Lavigne
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Maintain The Rage!
Add your voice to reason’s call.â┚¬Ã‚¨
Join the Tax Refusal. â┚¬Ã‚¨
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http://www.TaxRefusal.com
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And the related effort to wake the world:
STOP YOUR ENGINES !
http://www.StopYourEngines.com
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Two main tragedies make the Petraesu/McChrystal self-promoting COIN arguments beside the point:
(1) We are NOT fighting a counter-INSURGENCY war in Afghanistan but a counter-REVOLUTIONARY war. So where is our counter-REVOLUTION? The Taliban offers a revolution to Afghans in the form of swift Sharia justice in the order of an Islamic Emirate regime. That may seem unattractive to many of us, but most Afghans at the local rural level have shown to find this quite desirable, preferable to the American created Karzai Regime that Petraeus himself has labeled “an organized crime syndicate.”
Petraeus wrote a PhD thesis on the Vietnam War. Reading it would fully exhibit his shallowness of intellect and lack of historic understanding. A commander, as Napoleon had said, should be a top intellectual and scholar in order to be a successful general. There is little doubt of the mediocrity and incompetence, respectively, on the part of Petraeus and McChrystal on that score. One need only read their writings.
There is a critical lesson in the case of Vietnam. There too we sought to save South Vietnam by destroying it. So we plastered the countryside with indirect fire. The result was that the surviving peasants took refuge massively in the cities controlled by the dominant firepower, the Saigon regime. If effect, you might say, the peasant “sea” left the guerrilla “fish” high and dry, by becoming a swell of urban population. As Le Duc Tho, the No2 in the Hanoi regime, admitted in 1984, because the VietCong all through the Vietnam War had no urban infrastructure, it lost the population by 1967. It is here that one man– A CIVILIAN– “Blowtorch” Komer– under LBJ’s direct authorization, imposed CORDS, a resettlement program on the MACV military commanders. As Hanoi Radio lamented back then, South Vietnam went from 85% rural to 75% urban in a few years, and these refugees were absorbed into a CORDS created urban economy to become what Hanoi Radio called “petites bourgeois,” meaning a nation of shopkeepers integrated into that urban economy. Hanoi was, therefore, forced to resort to the Tet Offensive of January 1968 before accepting negotiations at Paris. As a result of the Tet Offensive, the cities held but the VietCong was decimated. From 1968 on the war was between ARVN/US regular troops and Hanoi’s regulars coming from North Vietnam, PAVN. The war was thus won by our side; it remained for Hanoi to win by diplomacy at Paris followed by peace treaty braking invasion of South Vietnam with every soldier it had.
The only revolution Americans ever proved capable of is URBANIZATION. Since the end of WWII, the US had urbanized Third World rural population thus immunizing them to Communism. Ironically, the Maoist “proletarian” (industrial workers) revolution could only succeed by lying to peasants, promising them their own plots of land after it took over. Of course, its goal was to industrialize agriculture in state farms and collectives where the peasants become mere farm hands. By creating small entrepreneur enterprises in towns, the US has, over and over again, defeated Communism with capital rather than with ordnance.
Donald Rumsfeld pushed Bush into Iraq because he thought he could win that war quickly with “shock&awe,” pull out, and then dethrone Bush in 2004 to replace him as president at that, Rumsfeld’s last shot at the presidency. Our military leadership’s incompetence and parrot-on-the-shoulder submissiveness to Rumsfeld as star whores can only be matched in outrageousness to SecDef Rumsfeld’s incompetence. As Iraq fizzled out into a smoldering mess, Petraeus– the perpetrator of a fraudulent “surge victory” which all analysts attribute to the change of position of Iraqi Sunnis rather than to any plan Petraeus, an ambitious careerists, might have proposedâ┚¬”ÂPetraeus/McChrystal sought a repeat of that Iraq Surge in Afghanistan in hope of a victory in the latter, covering-up the actualities of the former. So Petraeus bullied Obama into putting his man McChrystal in charge; then McChrystal bullied Obama into increasing US forces in Afghanistan by 60,000 troops by now.
Rather than learn from our rural–>urban revolutionary victory of Vietnam, Petraeus/McChrystal pushed for more troops, diluting them into the Afghan countryside. As in Vietnam, military success would have require over a million troops over a decade and $trillions (according to their own COIN Warfare thesis), which we then didn’t have, having just been fleeced into national poverty by Wall Street.
Nevertheless, had NATO earlier created its own cities in the then safe Northwest of Afghanistan where young people could be educated and trained for real economic development, leaving the countryside to the Taliban and constricting our perimeter of defense to a manageable form, we could have created our own URBAN REVOLUTION. Instead, we sent in ever more troop intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb to kill Afghans pointlessly in self-defense.
(2)A religious Muslim State harboring alQaeda is far more unacceptable for the nations of Central, South and East Asia…that includes Russian and China. They had, however, created a SHANGHAI COOPERATIVE ACCORD (SCA) because they knew that our reason for the war in Afghanistan was not to get binLaden but to seize access to Central Asian oil and develop pipelines that carry it to Pakistani warm water ports on the Indian Ocean. All the full and informal members of SCA then deemed stopping the US grab of territory more important than eliminating alQaeda and its Jihadi offshoots in the region. Had the US pulled out of that region, the SCA would have been left to work out its own internal dialectics to resolve the Afghan Taliban/alQaeda problem at their expense. Instead, so that the Chinese go easy on our $30 trillions in debt, Obama allowed Petraeus to, in effect, make our soldiers into mercenaries of the Chinese, going after the Taliban while Chinese firms go after the assets of Central and South Asia safely.
Our Pentagon is a treasure trove of evidence of our military incompetence and corruption. But it is allowed by law a level of secrecy that far surpasses that of the CIA. Consequently, at best, only our grand children will know what scumbags are and have been the Joint Chiefs of the last decade. But Americans don’t care as they cheer on the troops, thank them for their â┚¬Ã…“serviceâ┚¬Ã‚ and shake their hands while saying to themselves: “ain’t my kid going to war” now that ours is an all volunteer army.
Yet, as we waste our brave kids and what’s left of our national treasury to the incompetence of Petraeus and to his ambition of becoming another Ike-like president, we should stop and ask who and what will replace all our victims and waste to that incompetence?
death rattle of a declining superpower.
Aghanistan: Death for invaders. Alexander the Great, the British (twice), the USSR, and now the USA. In the words of the Russian poet Yestushenko: “When Will We Ever Learn…”
Yevtushenko.
I wonder exactly how much money we spend to kill each Taliban in Afghanistan? I bet we spend a million dollars if we rule out all the civilians that become Taliban when we kill them since the only good Afghan is a dead Afghan. The Taliban have a safe haven in Pakistan just like the Vietnamese fighting in S. Vietnam against the USA has a safe haven in Laos or Cambodia or N. Vietnam. We can never win this war in Afghanistan. We should just declare victory and leave.