From: BBlum6@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2010 2:28 PM
Subject: Be nice to America or we'll bring democracy to your country!
Animated cartoon about US foreign policy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee6SdmmCN5Y
Produced and directed by Charle Mauch and William Blum
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25198.htm
Hamid Karzai, R.I.P.
A prediction
By Justin Raimondo
April 12, 2010 "AntiWar" -- The war in Afghanistan, which George W. Bush
started and Barack Obama pledged to win, is over - and we lost. No one
realizes this, quite yet, but give them time - because the fruits of our
defeat are already a veritable cornucopia. And the reason can be summed up
rather neatly in two words: Hamid Karzai.
The fashion-plate heralded as the savior of Afghanistan by the Bush
administration is turning into the Americans' harshest critic: from quite
credibly claiming that the US was trying to manipulate the recent Afghan
election in order to give its sock-puppets the advantage, to declaring that
he's about ready to join the Taliban, President Karzai is making waves - and
coming in for a barrage of disdain from the Washington cognoscenti, who
cavil he's an "unreliable partner." Translated into ordinary language, this
means he isn't kowtowing to Washington's whims, and is instead seeking to
pursue his own aims - shocking, isn't it?
What's the reason for Washington's very public discontent with our erstwhile
"partner"? Well, in any relationship, you know, it's always the little
things that lead to divorce: like announcing you're about to walk out, and
not only that, but threatening to hook up with your ex's worst enemy.
However, that's just talk: banter, really, of the sort couples engage in all
the time when one is trying to gain the upper hand. It's the kind of thing
that could be tolerated, even enjoyed - at least if you're a character in a
play by Edward Albee.
Yet there's always a line you don't cross in public, certain subjects you
don't talk about to outsiders, unless you want to wind up in divorce court.
In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it was the secret of George and Martha's
imaginary son - in Who's Afraid of the Taliban? it's the secret of Karzai's
imaginary "government" - which, in reality, can hardly be said to exist
outside of Kabul's urban core. As Martha put it to George: "You're nothing!"
Billions of taxpayer dollars are going to aid the Afghan government - an
entity that, for all intents and purposes, doesn't really exist. What exists
are names on an organizational chart, a few offices in US-NATO -held areas,
a seat in the United Nations, and that's just about it. This gossamer
network of paid shills and American-educated sock-puppets is superimposed
over the real power structure of clan leaders and warlords, a thin thread
that could break at any moment. No one knows this better than Karzai, and so
he has taken a new tack to ensure his political - and physical - survival.
No amount of "spin" can interpret the following report, taken from the Times
of London, except as open subversion of the US-NATO war effort:
"The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has cast doubt over NATO's
planned summer offensive against the Taliban in the southern province of
Kandahar, as more than 10,000 American troops pour in for the fight.
"Karzai threatened to delay or even cancel the operation - one of the
biggest of the nine-year war - after being confronted in Kandahar by elders
who said it would bring strife, not security, to his home province.
"Visiting last week to rally support for the offensive, the president was
instead overwhelmed by a barrage of complaints about corruption and misrule.
As he was heckled at a shura of 1,500 tribal leaders and elders, he appeared
to offer them a veto over military action. "Are you happy or unhappy for the
operation to be carried out?" he asked.
"The elders shouted back: 'We are not happy.'
"Then until the time you say you are happy, the operation will not happen,"
Karzai replied.
"General Stanley McChrystal, the NATO commander, who was sitting behind him,
looked distinctly apprehensive."
As well he might. Karzai is either going to change his tune, or else find
himself the victim of an "accident": a military coup is not out of the
question. If I were the CIA station chief, I'd release those photos of
Karzai toking on a hashish pipe. And if I were Karzai, I'd send my resume to
Gucci, and get out of town fast. Because "the chicest man on the planet"
wouldn't do well at Bagram.
Like all weaklings, whenever Karzai tries to assert himself he only
underscores his impotence: he has no chance of stopping the Kandahar
offensive, and everyone - including the attendees at the shura - knows it.
What this does, however, is make mincemeat of the announced American
strategy, which is to "clear, hold, and build." Because at this point it's
fair to ask what, exactly, are we building - the largely imaginary national
"government" headed by Karzai, who can only hope to gain popular support by
denouncing Washington?
Instead of building a stable or even credible Afghan government, the
spanking new counterinsurgency doctrine propounded by Gen. David Petraeus,
and those Deep Thinkers over at the Center for a New American Security, is
creating the conditions for America's inevitable defeat. As long as the
Obama-ites have Karzai on their hands, the experiment that was supposed to
prove the validity of the Petraeus doctrine winds up creating a Frankenstein
monster, at best, feeding the very forces fighting the American presence.
Which is why you don't have to be Nostradamus to predict Karzai's exit from
the presidential palace, sooner rather than later.
Oh, they say they can work around Karzai, and deal with local clan leaders.
Yet these very same clan leaders, at least the ones in Kandahar, are less
than enthusiastic about the American occupation. The great problem we have
yet to overcome in Afghanistan is that the majority of the population
clearly sympathizes with what American journalists lazily call "the
Taliban," and which is really a series of local insurgencies which have
largely supplanted the old Taliban leadership of Mullah Omar as the chief
military resistance to the occupation. Both the fighting core of the Taliban
and certainly Al-Qaeda have long since fled to Pakistan and points beyond:
what we are fighting in Afghanistan is a fresh crop of militants bred in the
horror of nearly ten years of constant warfare.
A war is like any and all [.pdf] government programs: its advocates and
beneficiaries (very often the same people) seek to prolong it long after its
original rationale has been rendered irrelevant and/or conveniently
forgotten, and the Afghan example is a veritable textbook case.
As announced by President Obama, our war aims in Afghanistan are to disrupt
and destroy al-Qaeda cells resident in that country, a goal that has long
since been accomplished. Al Qaeda can hardly be said to exist in Afghanistan
these days, and the same goes for the Taliban remnants. The more
sophisticated war proponents acknowledge this. The real problem, they aver,
is Pakistan, where they strongly imply bin Laden is hiding out. (Hillary
Clinton apparently believes this.)
The government of Pakistan denies this, and, in spite of Hillary's hectoring
hysterics, it's been the Pakistanis who have taken out and actually captured
a good number of the top al-Qaeda leaders, who are today in custody - far
more than we have. If bin Laden and/or his top cohorts were in Pakistan, and
the ISI knew it, who can doubt they'd turn them over - just to get the US to
stop the not-so-secret "secret war" the Pentagon's been waging on Pakistani
soil?
Our announced war aims are like George and Martha's imaginary son: it's all
part of a private narrative, a story we tell ourselves that somehow
reassures us and makes us feel better - even noble - as we enslave, torture,
and ravage a country in the name of "progress" and civilization.
So if these aren't our real aims, if the whole thing's a fairy tale, then
what's the real reason we're wreaking mayhem in that part of the world?
The answer, I fear, is not to be found in any theory of politics, economics,
or international affairs, but in one neglected field of human psychology:
the psychology of political power, and those who wield it.
Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author
of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books,
2000), Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative
Movement (ISI, 2008), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S.
Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a senior fellow
at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von
Mises Institute. He writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American
Culture.
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