Alpe d'Huez said:
Larry Craig was the "wide stance" guy. Republican Senator from Idaho. Amazingly, even after other men came out and said they had sex with him, he continued to deny and remained in office until the end of his term.
Republican, Democrat, bah. Now, if she were a Native American screaming at white people, I could understand that. AIM needs to re-unite!
Depends on how one defines "work". As no goal was ever truly defined for not only the surge, but the war(s), just loose descriptions, quantifying any sort of success is essentially impossible.
This is why "Mission Accomplished" was in some ways true.
Same thing going on with Libya.
No hard defined goal. No exit strategy. This allows Obama to declare the set-up of multi-national troops on the ground and US jets flying over a "victory", even if Qaddafi remains in power and keeps his own people living in penury through oppression.
When you build your skyscraper in quicksand, as long as you keep building floors above, no matter how many below are sucked into the muck, you can always say you're ahead of the game and making progress.
I'm telling you guys, you want to really know global military power and the government, read
Andrew Bacevich's book. Or some of the interviews with him.
With Bill Moyers on PBS, 27 minutes. Or
interview with Lawerence Velvel, over 1 hour.
Mission accomplished was, of course, in reference to making Saddam fall, to then be able to set up a puppet government, guided by our interests, which would then be passed off as "democracy" to all the idiots.
We could not (ever) have cared a damn about democracy, or humanitarianism. It was all about oil, just an ideological war fought for oil, in the interests of a few ideologues and major multinationals.
The truly perverse thing is that, while the country sinks further into debt, there are a few private businesses (hired "security" firms, really a euphemism for mercenaries) and industries that have made a killing (among the slaughter) in all of this business, which is what it should really be called, not war, but business, for which there
can be no clear exit strategy.
Then, because of this business, which they have passed of for America's wars, we end up squabbling over "when its ok to intervene" and "when it isn't". Because when it's just about business, and not war, and thus not about stopping a mad dictator from bombing his people as in Libya for instance, then we are forced to make calculated decisions about the monetary concerns and about the prudence of our financial commitment, and what we are really fighting for (when such was not too much of a concern when we invaded Mesopotamia, because we had false alibis and a manipulated public sentiment) and all the rest; but never about the humanitarian issues that the destitute and weak are really living on their skins, in part because of the West's business and governmental praxis in the region.
I have mentioned previously the immigration crisis in Italy, from North Africa, by way of Lampedusa. Yesterday some 250 people, many women and children, drowned about two K from the island's coast when their boat capsized. Due to all the strife, not only in the Maghreb, but throughout Africa as a whole, it's already certain that in the next several years there will be a continuous emergency with immigration in the Mediterranean. While it is Utopian to think that the phenomenon can be arrested only with increased policing efforts, even less with treaties, as the xenophobic right wing governments believe, when the root problems of tyranny and poverty continue in Africa. Rather it's possible to alleviate it only by working on how these people can live in a more dignified way in their countries of origin, but this implies that we must find a way to help the Africans, as a whole, become less poor and a bit wealthier (and not just a few dictators we support or tolerate, because economically and socially convenient). We shouldn't forget that amidst the total indifference to many regions of the continent on the part of the international community, millions (over 50) of hectares of fertile land is being expropriated to foreign states with the connivance of local governments. It happens in Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, the Sudan: land is being conceded for 20, 30, even 90, years to countries like China and Korea to produce commodities, above all bio-fuel, that does little to nothing for the local well-being. Land is the most precious thing the Africans have, the key to their development, and yet there is a continuous intensification of this "land grabbing", for which we have constrained them towards commodities growth of single products like cotton, coffee and cocoa, which is then followed by speculation on their base values at the world's financial markets that invariably conducts the Africans to desperation and flight, when all that wealth has been stripped form them.
We say with words we want to help the Africans, but by the facts of our actions we constrain them to flee.
Now with the current state also in the Maghreb, the boiling pot is on the verge of exploding. And once again, the rest of the world argues about what should be done, when it has been all too obvious for years
what should have been done.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram