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obama's wars

 

Lowering America’s War Ceiling?
Imperial Psychosis on Display
By Tom Engelhardt

By now, it seems as if everybody and his brother has joined the debt-ceiling imbroglio in Washington, perhaps the strangest homespun drama of our time.  It’s as if Washington’s leading political players, aided and abetted by the media’s love of the horserace, had eaten LSD-laced brownies, then gone on stage before an audience of millions to enact a psychotic spectacle of American decline.

And yet, among the dramatis personae we’ve been watching, there are clearly missing actors.  They happen to be out of town, part of a traveling roadshow.  When it comes to their production, however, there has, of late, been little publicity, few reviewers, and only the most modest media attention.  Moreover, unlike the scenery-chewing divas in Washington, these actors have simply been going about their business as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

On July 25th, for instance, while John Boehner raced around the Capitol desperately pressing Republican House members for votes on a debt-ceiling bill that Harry Reid was calling dead-on-arrival in the Senate, America’s new ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, took his oath of office in distant Kabul.  According to the New York Times, he then gave a short speech “warning” that “Western powers needed to ‘proceed carefully’” and emphasized that when it came to the war, there would “be no rush for the exits.”

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175425/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_two-faced_washington/

a global war...

Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission.  Now, say that 70 times and you’re done... for the day.  Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries.  This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden’s chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight.  It was atypical.  While it’s well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175426/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_uncovering_the_military%27s_secret_military/

unspoken name of the game...

Now NATO has forced an inquiry into Colonel Gaddafi's death on Libya's liberators. If I were them, I wouldn't bother because they were only following the precedent set by the USA. Extra-judicial murder has become the USA's stock in trade, Osama bin Laden shot dead and US citizen and radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki blown to bits by a Predator drone in Yemen. Worse still, two weeks later al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman and his 17-year-old cousin were dispatched in the same clinical manner, from the sky, as they prepared a barbeque at home, far from any front line and, of course, without due process.

At least you could say Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a kangaroo court.

A few months ago the Washington Post editorialised that the US should use the Osama assassination model against Gaddafi. It didn't need to; Libya's freedom fighters did it for them. No embarrassing trial, no undesirable secrets aired, just the dispatch of the West's latest villain du jour who happens to be sitting on a lot of oil.

NATO, in bombing parts of Libya back to the stone age, has done with propaganda and public relations what Germany did with panzers. It has secured 2 per cent of the world's oil supplies and a convenient jumping off point for imperial adventures in Africa plus regained control of the Arab Spring.

The Wall Street protestors may not realise it yet but they have a common enemy in the military industrial complex. And as we invade or take over yet another sovereign nation, how long will it be before there are international brigades, drawn from the West's dispossessed, fighting against globalised corporate tyranny on some foreign shore?

Is this the only way to stop the West from becoming what we so despised at the outbreak of World War II?

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3601392.html?WT.svl=theDrum

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