Written & Directed by Phillip Montgomery
Narrated by Ryan Gosling
Featuring
Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Howard Zinn,
Andrew Bacevich, Michael Albert, Mos Def & Others
Wednesday, December 1st - 8:00 PM
The Historic Egyptian Theater
Artivist Film Festival
6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood 90028
The film will be presented as the opening night film of the Artivist Film
Festival: www.artivist.com
ReGENERATION explores the causes behind the widespread cynicism and apathy
in today's youth
towards social and political causes and what they must do to take their
country back!
TICKETS ARE FREE AT:
http://artivist.eventbrite.com/
To learn more about the film visit: www.regeneration-themovie.com
Watch Film Trailer at:
www.regeneration-themovie.com/trailer.html
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26885.htm
What If NATO Is Defeated In Afghanistan?
By Eric S. Margolis
November 20, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Amazing as it sounds,
NATO, the world's most powerful military alliance, may be losing the only
war the 61-year old pact every fought. All its soldiers, heavy bombers,
tanks, helicopter gunships, armies of mercenaries, and electronic gear are
being beaten by a bunch of lightly-armed Afghan farmers and mountain
tribesmen.
This weekend in Lisbon, NATO's 28 members face deepening differences over
the Afghanistan War as public opinion in the United States, Canada and
Europe continue to turn against the conflict.
President Barack Obama again painfully showed he is not fully in charge of
US foreign policy. His pledge to begin withdrawing some US troops from
Afghanistan next July has been brazenly - even scornfully - contradicted by
US generals and strongly opposed by resurgent Congressional Republicans.
Hardly anyone believes the president's withdrawal date.
Obama is fresh from groveling before Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He
pleaded with Israel's leader to impose a short, token freeze on settlement
building in exchange for a multi-billion dollar bribe from Washington of
advanced US F-35 stealth warplanes, promises of UN vetoes, and raising the
value of US arms stockpiled for Israel's use to $1 billion. Rarely has a US
president crawled so low.
Israel will likely take Obama's bribe, with more sweeteners, but not before
rubbing his face in the dirt to show who really runs US Mideast policy and
as a warning not to mess with Israel. The last US president to challenge
Israel's colonization of the West Bank, George H. W. Bush, was ousted in
1992 after one term.
Obama appears to want out of the Afghan War. His final gamble of sending
30,000 more troops into the $7.5 billion monthly war has so far failed to
produce the hoped-for decisive victory. But powerful pro-war groups,
including the Pentagon, the arms industry and Republicans, are thwarting the
weakened Obama's attempts to wind down the war.
US, Canadian and European politicians who backed the Afghan War fear
admitting the conflict was a huge waste of lives and treasure. Their
political careers hang in the balance.
Canada's prime minister, who is trying to assume the former role of
Britain's
Tony Blair as Washington's most obedient ally, just announced 900 Canadian
soldiers will remain in Afghanistan after his own pullout date, ostensibly
for "training."
That, of course, is the new euphemism for staying on as a permanent garrison
to keep the Afghan client regime in power. "Training," as with US forces in
Iraq, really means the old British Raj's native troops under white officers.
Canadian journalists who opposed continuation of the Afghan War, or exposed
many of the lies that justify it, have been purged from their newspapers
under pressure from the Harper government - which claims, ironically, to be
fighting in Afghanistan for "democracy."
While the US heads deeper into war and debt, its European allies are fed up
with what was supposed to have been a limited "police action" to eliminate
al-Qaida bases.
Instead, Europe got a full-scale war against Afghanistan's Pashtun tribes
raising uneasy memories of its 19th-century colonial "pacifications."
France's new defense minister, Alain Juppé, openly called the Afghan
conflict a "trap" for NATO and called for an exit strategy. He is quite
right.
By contrast, British Defense Chief Gen. Sir David Richards, warned, "NATO
now needs to plan for a 30 or 40 year role." In short, permanent occupation.
That may be the bottom line, at least for the imperial camp. Central Asia's
resources are the real reason.
The US-installed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is demanding the US scale
back military operations and night raids that inflict heavy civilian
casualties. Washington counters that Karzai is mentally unstable. He is
marked to be overthrown once Washington can find a suitable Pashtun
replacement.
America's rational for invading Afghanistan was to destroy al-Qaida. But CIA
chief Leon Panetta recently admitted there were no more than 50 al-Qaida
operatives left in Afghanistan. The rest - no more than few hundred - fled
to Pakistan years ago.
So what are 110,000 US troops and 40,000 NATO troops doing in Afghanistan?
Certainly not nation-building. Most reports show Afghanistan is in worse
poverty and distress than before the US invasion.
While the platitudes and synthetic optimism flowed thick at Lisbon, giant US
Army bulldozers, demolition teams and artillery were busy leveling wide
swathes of Afghan homes around the Pashtun stronghold, Kandahar. In 2006, US
Marines conducted a similar ruthless campaign to crush the rebellious Iraqi
city of Falluja.
The US is using the same punitive tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq as Israel
employs on the occupied West Bank: targeted assassinations, death squads,
demolishing buildings and whole neighborhoods to punish and open fields of
fire. In fact, the US military has often been guided by Israeli advisors in
such operations.
Destroying large parts of Kandahar is a sign of growing US frustration and a
sense the war is being lost. It certainly won't win hearts and minds of the
locals, the stated goal of US proconsul Gen. David Petraeus.
Like the rest of the Pentagon, Petraeus is determined that the mighty US
military must not be defeated by Afghan tribesmen. The humiliation would be
intolerable. Defeat in Afghanistan would bring demands for major cuts in the
bloated US military, a Leviathan that consumes 50% of world military
spending.
Washington's so-called national security establishment (in Britain they used
to be called "imperialists") also fears failure in Afghanistan threatens to
undermine the entire NATO alliance.
Europe is slowly re-emerging as a world power, however fitfully and
painfully. NATO has been the primary tool of US geopolitical control of
Western Europe since the late 1940's. The Japan-US security pact has played
the same role in north Asia.
The loss of the Afghan War by the US and its reluctant allies will call into
question the reason for the alliance and likely hasten Europe building an
integrated military independent of US control. America's grip on Western
Europe would be ended.
That is why Afghanistan so unnerves Washington's right wingers. The defeat
of Soviet armies in Afghanistan in 1989 began the collapse of the Soviet
Empire. Could the same fate be in store for the American Raj?
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2010 - http://www.ericmargolis.com/
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