Jim Hightower: Take a Stand Against Obama’s War

» John Locke on 12.03.09 @ 08:49 AM

Yes, let’s let the Taliban and Al Qaeda continue their reign of terror, continue to marginalize women and fail to educate all citizens, continue genital mutilation of women.  By all means….

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» Bruce Holms on 12.03.09 @ 10:50 AM

Bush and Cheney got us into the Afghanistan War. Not Obama!

Republican’s (once again) have selective memory.

This is why WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.

Now, Republican’s want to twist the TRUTH around so that it will be a Democrat’s war of futility.

Meanwhile the real issue here is this:
From an article by Paul Craig Roberts, “The Least Powerful Man”
<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info>.

“President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.

Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.” And the mere president has to say, “Yes, Sir!”

The real entitlements are never mentioned. The “defense” budget is an entitlement for the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned us 50 years ago. A person has to be crazy to believe that the United States, “the world’s only superpower,” protected by oceans on its East and West and by puppet states on its North and South, needs a “defense” budget larger than the military spending of the rest of the world combined.

The military budget is nothing but an entitlement for the military/security complex. To hide this fact, the entitlement is disguised as protection against “enemies” and passed through the Pentagon.

The US invasion of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with American national interests. It had to do with armaments profits and with eliminating an obstacle to Israeli territorial expansion. The cost of the war, aside from the $3 trillion, was over 4,000 dead Americans, over 30,000 wounded and maimed Americans, tens of thousands of broken American marriages and lost careers, one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and a destroyed country.

All of this was done for the profits of the military/security complex and to make paranoid Israel, armed with 200 nuclear weapons, feel “secure.”

The American people have no effect on anything. They can affect nothing. They have become irrelevant like Obama. And they will remain irrelevant as long as organized interest groups can purchase the US government.

The inability of the American democracy to produce any results that the voters want is a demonstrated fact. The total unresponsiveness of government to the people is conservatism’s contribution to American democracy. Some years ago there was an effort to put government back into the hands of the people by constraining the ability of organized interest groups to pour enormous amounts of money into political campaigns and, thus, obligate the elected official to those whose money elected him. Conservatives said that any restraints would be a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

The same “protectors” of “free speech” had no objection to the Israel Lobby’s passage of the “hate speech” bill, which has criminalized criticism of Israel’s genocidal treatment of the Palestinians and continuing theft of their lands.

Russia’s Putin has already compared the US to Nazi Germany, and the Chinese premier has likened the US to an irresponsible, profligate debtor.

Increasingly the rest of the world sees the US as the sole source of all of its problems. Germany has lost the chief of its armed forces and its defense minister, because the US convinced or pressured, by hook or crook, the German government to violate its Constitution and to send troops to fight for Unocal’s interest in Afghanistan. The Germans had pretended that their troops were not really fighting, but were were engaged in a “peace-keeping operation.” This more or less worked until the Germans called in an air strike that murdered 100 women and children lined up for a fuel allotment.” - Paul Craig Roberts

FINAL THOUGHT - Stop blaming Obama for Bush’s war - start doing something constructive like passing “HEALTH CARE REFORM” - stop wasting money on killing Americans in war and start spending it on saving Americans at home!

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» AN50 on 12.03.09 @ 05:11 PM

Oh Jimmy, he is your guy. Yes he is blowing it Jimmy but not because he is a runaway and hide appeaser coward like the left in this country. He is blowing it trying to be all things to all people. Not much leadership quality there.
We are all tired of war, so let’s get it over with and win the damned thing, eh? We already know how to do that and we tried your way in Vietnam. Too bad 3 million Vietnamese had to pay the price for our turn tail and run strategy. Too bad tens of thousands of our soldiers lost their lives so some wimpy democrats could feel good back home. Too bad Jim you folks on the left never learn from history. No I don’t believe the republicans have done much better. I am no fan of “containment” the last time we did that it cost the world 150 million lives, 100’s of trillions of dollars and solved nothing. I’m sick of our military, the best in the world, being used by Washington politicians as cannon fodder for their political exploits so they can “play” policeman to the world. I don’t give a flying fart for the world and its problems. It’s not our fault and we don’t need to clean up. However, if someone wants to give us crap, squash them like a bug and tell the survivors your next if you cross us too! Afghanistan is winnable even if doing so means turning the place to radioactive glass for the next 100,000 years. Dammit, you don’t try to talk your way out of trouble if that means more trouble later. The bad guys thrive on the left’s weak, appeasing, “why can’t we just talk” approach to problem solving.
Bruce, why do you care what the hell Putin says or the Chinese premier (though I agree with him)? You and the liberals in this country really have some deep seated problems when you think you ought to take the advice of people who hate you. You are suicidal and now we have one of you suicidal idiots running the country. If Obama was smart, really smart he would convince our enemies we are the weak appeasers he makes us look like then turn around and nuke the ever lovin crap out of them. We may suffer an increase in cancer deaths for a few decades, but we would still be alive and free rather than bowing to Mecca or dead.

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» From Our Correspondant in Utah on 12.04.09 @ 01:41 AM

Reply to: ‘AN50’ = “AMEN - with a qualifier”.

“Containment” as it would be mis-interpretted by federal government bureaucracies - for the sordid purposes of ‘self-perpetuation’ - became morphed into “military encirclement”! 

THAT WOULD BE PRECISELY the opposite of Kennan’s intent!

The ‘father of containment’ - US diplomat GEORGE FROST KENNAN - intended the term to actually mean: “Economic competition”! 

Kennan would much later write extensively - too late - in an effort to clarify—for history, not for policy.

In his two volume Pulitzer Prize winning “MEMOIRS” - See Volume I, Chapter 15 on his anonymously authored piece in “Foreign Affairs Quarterly” titled “The ‘X’ Article” which is regarded as the bed-rock & foundation document for “policy run amok” cum latter day containment.

* * * * *

Syndicated and respected national news columnist (and a superb BUT under-rated policy analyst in his own right, before ‘investigative journalism’ became all the rage during “Watergate”)= WALTER LIPPMANN correctly regarded GEORGE KENNAN as the anonymous author of “The X” piece!

KENNAN even wrote a confirmation to LIPPMANN, but it was never sent.  For lots of bad reasons - Then and now!

* * * * *

The sordid details of “what might have been” are best left to KENNAN’s own words in those amazing “Memoirs”.

There are - TRULY - “lessons to be learned” for today!

* * * * *

But from all I have read in the open literature & in the news reporting so far: “The OBAMA-nauts” have been reading ALL THE WRONG BOOKS!

Over time, policy ‘wonks’ and ‘wannabes’ have become lazy!

They have sunk into an abyss of using only secondary and quite horribly tertiary “revisionist” histories as the basis for any next steps in today’s policy resolutions.

IT IS POTENTIALLY FATAL, IMHO!

* * * * *

WORSE: Academics - in the fatal name of either “publish or perish” (sic.) - DON’T KNOW WHERE[!] TO LOOK FOR ANY PRIMARY SOURCES, as modest first steps in understanding our very recent history! 

They don’t even know what a “primary source” is now!

* * * * *

RESULT = WE AS U.S. CITIZENS ARE THE LESSER FOR THOSE POTENTIALLY CATACLYSMIC FAILINGS, by our policy elites!

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