Thursday 9th of May 2024
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gotta love this endless war .....

gotta love this endless war .....

Even for the humble among us who try to avoid jingoistic outbursts, some national achievements are so grand that they merit a moment of pride & celebration.

The Soviet Union couldn't win in Afghanistan & now the US is about to have something in common with that futile campaign: nine years, 50 days.

On Friday, the US-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state.

It seems clear that a similar - or even grander - prize awaits us as the one with which the Soviets were rewarded. I hope nobody thinks that just because we can't identify who the Taliban leaders are after almost a decade over there, that this somehow calls into doubt our ability to magically re-make that nation.  Even if it did, it's vital that we stop the threat of Terrorism & nothing helps to do that like spending a full decade - & counting - invading, occupying & bombing Muslim countries.

The good news - beyond our shattering this record & thus showing that we can still kick those Soviets around even after they no longer exist - is that this decade of utter futility hasn't at all diminished the Government's appetite for endless war in the Muslim world.  

By all accounts, the administration is actively debating whether to accelerate its already escalated intervention in Yemen. We've dramatically increased our covert actions in countless countries across the Muslim world. 

And today, former Bush State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III (one of the "moderates" from that era) argues in The Washington Post for a re-writing of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) - not in order to rescind it after nine years of endless war-fighting, but rather to expand it, on the ground that it "provides insufficient authority for our military & intelligence personnel to conduct counterterrorism operations today" & outrageously fails to empower the President's "wish to target or detain a terrorist who is not part of al-Qaeda" (for good measure, he also wants the new law to authorize the killing of American citizens & to allow detention without charges).  

Clearly, the AUMF is far too narrow & weak for our purposes since - as Bellinger notes - this is all we've been able to do in its name:

The Bush & Obama administrations have relied on this authority to wage the ground war in Afghanistan; to exert lethal force (including drone strikes) against al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, Yemen & Somalia; & to detain suspected al-Qaeda & Taliban members in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba & Afghanistan.

What kind of lame AUMF is that?  A decade's worth of war, some slaughtering through the use of remote-controlled sky robots over a few countries, & a worldwide regime of lawless detention? How are we supposed to Stay Safe when we tie one arm behind our back that way?

Fortunately, if this vision of Expanded Endless War proves to be unwise, the harm will be contained, since the US - unlike the former Soviet Union - is so financially strong that it can easily sustain this. 

And whatever else is true, there's one thing we should all be able to agree on:  the person presiding over all of this deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

the enemy...

At least the soviets did not finance the taliban nor the war-lords against NATO, like the CIA did against the Russians... The Russians got defeated mostly because the US was financing the war on the other side till the "bitter end". The USA does not like COMMUNISM — COMMUNISM is evil. So when the Russians came to help the budding socialist government in Afghanistan, the USA had only to get a whiff of the word SOCIALISM to actually supply money and armament to the most horrid backward fierce people on earth: the Taliban... the Taliban who of course is now the ENEMY...

Hypocrisy? Sure...

the big business of war...

From Robert Fisk

Since there are now three conflicts in the greater Middle East; Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel/"Palestine" and maybe another Lebanese war in the offing, it might be a good idea to take a look at the cost of war.

Not the human cost – 80 lives a day in Iraq, unknown numbers in Afghanistan, one a day in Israel/"Palestine" (for now) – but the financial one. I'm still obsessed by the Saudi claim for its money back after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Hadn't Saudi Arabia, King Fahd reminded Saddam, financed his eight-year war against Iran to the tune of $25,734,469,885.80? For the custodian of the two holy places, Mecca and Medina, to have shelled out $25bn for Saddam to slaughter his fellow Muslims was pretty generous – although asking for that extra 80 cents was surely a bit greedy.

...

Let's break down the 2006 Lebanon war figures. Bridges and roads: $450m. Utilities: $419m. Housing: $2bn. But military "institutions": a paltry $16m. Hizbollah apparently spent $300m. Overall, rebuilding came to $319m, infrastructure repairs to $454m, oil spill costs to $175m. Just for sadistic fun, you can add forest fires ($4.6m), displaced civilians ($52m) and Beirut airport ($170m). But the biggest cost of all? Tourism, at $3-4bn. Now Israel. Tourism lost $1.4 bn, "government and emergency services" $460n, businesses $1.4bn, compensation paid out $335.4m, forest fires $18m. What have the Israeli army and Hizbollah got against forests? In all, the Israeli losses amounted to 1.5 per cent of GDP, the Lebanese 8 per cent of GDP.

And just look at the Middle East "arms race" – the jockeys being the arms manufacturers, the punters being the countries of the region and, of course, their "huddled masses". Saudi Arabia, as the Mumbai report said, leaps in a decade between 1996 and 2006 from $18bn to $30bn a year – it's just negotiating a $60bn deal with the US – and Iran from $3bn to $10bn. Israel has gone from $8bn to $12bn. In fact, there's an interesting correlation between Israel's state-of-the-art democratically minded missile-firings between 2000 and 2007 – 34,050 – and Hamas's evil, terrorist-inspired missile firings: a rather piffling 2,333.

There's a host of other goodies in this appalling list of financial and social horrors. On 11 September 2001, just 16 people were on America's "no-fly" list; by December, it was 594. By August 2008, it had reached an astonishing 100,000. At present rate, the US "terrorist watch list" will reach two million souls in two years' time. Since 1974, UN peacekeepers on the Golan Heights have cost $47.86m while the UN has forked out $680.93m for its forces in southern Lebanon since 1978.

So coming soon to a war near you; oceans of blood, bodies torn to shreds, of course. But bring your credit card. Or a cheque book. It's big business. And there may be profits.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-oceans-of-blood-and-profits-for-the-mongers-of-war-2145037.html