Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Addicted to War: America’s Brutal Pipe Dream in Afghanistan

Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 11:39
Looks like the “Good War” in Afghanistan is morphing even more directly into the “Drug War” that the U.S. government has been waging all over the world — and especially against its own people — for almost 40 years now, with all the attendant aggrandizement of authoritarian powers and degradation of civil liberties and human rights.

As The Times reports, and Pentagon brass confirmed, the “continuity government” of the Obama Administration has drawn up yet another “hit list” of people to be arbitrarily assassinated: 50 “drug lords” allegedly associated with the Taliban. No doubt the many drug lords associated with the American-installed Afghan government — and those cooperating directly with the Western occupation — are exempt from this dirty laundry list.

Of course, the runaway cultivation of opium in Afghanistan — which is now flooding not only the West but also vast swathes of Central Asia with cheap heroin — is a direct result of the American invasion in 2001: an operation ostensibly designed to capture Osama bin Laden, who somehow curiously slipped away from the Americans’ curiously porous encirclement, never to be seen again (except of course for a few curiously timed transmission that seemed, curiously enough, to be geared to the domestic political needs of America’s militarist factions). Of course, before the invasion, the Taliban had largely — if ruthlesssly — eliminated the cultivation of opium in the areas under its control. But the American military — and its gung-ho CIA operatives (”We’re killing people!” as one CIAer exulted to the Boston Globe) — instead empowered the Northern Alliance: the Russian-backed conglomerate of warlords and druglords who were freely growing opium in their territories.

Now the Afghan insurgents — themselves a loose conglomeration of factions given the conveniently misleading monolithic moniker of “the Taliban” — have taken up the opium trade to help finance their operations as well. Meanwhile, poor Afghans are dependent on the opium trade, which fetches prices far above anything else they can grow. After all, their society and economy have been systematically destroyed by 30 years of savage war, kicked off not by the Soviet intervention in 1980 but by a terrorist campaign by religious extremists armed, funded and encouraged by the good Christian administration of Jimmy Carter, whose “national security” honcho, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wanted to draw the Soviets into “their own Vietnam” in support of their client regime in Kabul. Now, as Jason Ditz – an indispensible chronicler of the Terror War in Central Asia – points out, the Americans are adopting the Soviets’ own failed strategy in Afghanistan: death-dealing military “surges” combined with wads of cash thrown blindly into the economic chaos caused by the military action.

But you can’t “build” a state while you are simultaneously waging war inside it. And you certainly can’t build it by killing  cucumber farmers, as U.S. forces did the other day. Expect even more of this as the Pentagon gears up its “Drug War” weaponry to eliminate the rivals of its favored criminals – sorry, I mean to wipe out the scourge of Afghanistan’s Taliban drug lord devils.

If all of this seems grimly familiar, that’s because it is. I’ve been writing about the merging of the Terror War and the Drug War in Afghanistan since… November 2001, a few scant weeks after the Bush Administration sent the “carpet of bombs” they promised the Taliban – back in June 2001; yes, before “the whole world changed” on 9/11 – if they didn’t play ball on the oil pipelines that Western consortiums were looking to lay across Afghanistan. It was obvious even then where we were going, as I noted in the Moscow Times, in that long-ago November:

Among the isolated, out-of-step losers who dare open their mouths to mutter “doubts” about America’s military campaign in Afghanistan, you will sometimes hear the traitorous comment: “This war is just about oil.”

We take stern exception to such cynical tommyrot. No one who has made a clear and dispassionate assessment of the situation in the region could possibly say the new Afghan war is “just about oil.”

It’s also about drugs. ….

Addicted to War: America’s Brutal Pipe Dream in Afghanistan.

August 12th, 2009 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment |

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