Saving Face in Afghanistan
By Ron Paul
October 14, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- This past week there
has been a lot of discussion and debate on the continuing war in
Afghanistan. Lasting twice as long as World War II and with no end in sight,
the war in Afghanistan has been one of the longest conflicts in which our
country has ever been involved. The situation has only gotten worse with
recent escalations.
The current debate is focused entirely on the question of troop
levels. How many more troops should be sent over in order to pursue the war?
The administration has already approved an additional 21,000 American
service men and women to be deployed by November, which will increase our
troop levels to 68,000. Will another 40,000 do the job? Or should we
eventually build up the levels to 100,000 in addition to that? Why not
500,000 - just to be "safe"? And how will public support be brought back
around to supporting this war again when 58 percent are now against it?
I get quite annoyed at this very narrow line of questioning. I have
other questions. We overthrew the Taliban government in 2001 with less than
10,000 American troops. Why does it now seem that the more troops we send,
the worse things get? If the Soviets bankrupted themselves in Afghanistan
with troop levels of 100,000 and were eventually forced to leave in
humiliating defeat, why are we determined to follow their example? Most
importantly, what is there to be gained from all this? We've invested
billions of dollars and thousands of precious lives - for what?
The truth is it is no coincidence that the more troops we send the
worse things get. Things are getting worse precisely because we are sending
more troops and escalating the violence. We are hoping that good leadership
wins out in Afghanistan, but the pool of potential honest leaders from which
to draw have been fleeing the violence, leaving a tremendous power vacuum
behind. War does not quell bad leaders. It creates them. And the more war we
visit on this country, the more bad leaders we will inadvertently create.
Another thing that war does is create anger with its indiscriminate
violence and injustice. How many innocent civilians have been harmed from
clumsy bombings and mistakes that end up costing lives? People die from
simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time in a war zone, but the
killers never face consequences. Imagine the resentment and anger survivors
must feel when a family member is killed and nothing is done about it. When
there are no other jobs available because all the businesses have fled, what
else is there to do, but join ranks with the resistance where there is a
paycheck and also an opportunity for revenge? This is no justification for
our enemies over there, but we have to accept that when we push people, they
will push back.
The real question is why are we there at all? What do our efforts now
have to do with the original authorization of the use of force? We are no
longer dealing with anything or anyone involved in the attacks of 9/11. At
this point we are only strengthening the resolve and the ranks of our
enemies. We have nothing left to win. We are only there to save face, and in
the end we will not even be able to do that.
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23675.htm#
A Genocide Forgotten:
Armenians horrified by treaty with Turkey
A new trade deal is set to gloss over the murder of 1.5 million people
By Robert Fisk
October 08, 2009 "The Independent" -- In the autumn of 1915, an
Austrian engineer called Litzmayer, who was helping build the
Constantinople-Baghdad railway, saw what he thought was a large Turkish army
heading for Mesopotamia. But as the crowd came closer, he realised it was a
huge caravan of women, moving forward under the supervision of soldiers.
The 40,000 or so women were all Armenians, separated from their men -
most of whom had already had their throats cut by Turkish gendarmerie - and
deported on a genocidal death march during which up to 1.5 million Armenians
died.
Subjected to constant rape and beatings, some had already swallowed
poison on their way from their homes in Erzerum, Serena, Sivas, Bitlis and
other cities in Turkish western Armenia. "Some of them," Bishop Grigoris
Balakian, one of Litzmayer's contemporaries, recorded, "had been driven to
such a state that they were mere skeletons enveloped in rags, with skin that
had turned leathery, burned from the sun, cold, and wind. Many pregnant
women, having become numb, had left their newborns on the side of the road
as a protest against mankind and God." Every year, new evidence emerges
about this mass ethnic cleansing, the first holocaust of the last century;
and every year, Turkey denies that it ever committed genocide. Yet on
Saturday - to the horror of millions of descendants of Armenian survivors -
the President of Armenia, Serg Sarkissian, plans to agree to a protocol with
Turkey to re-open diplomatic relations, which should allow for new trade
concessions and oil interests. And he proposes to do this without honouring
his most important promise to Armenians abroad - to demand that Turkey admit
it carried out the Armenian genocide in 1915.
In Beirut yesterday, outside Mr Sarkissian's hotel, thousands of
Armenians protested against this trade-for-denial treaty. "We will not
forget," their banners read. "Armenian history is not for sale." They called
the President a traitor. "Why should our million and a half martyrs be put
up for sale?" one of them asked. "And what about our Armenian lands in
Turkey, the homes our grandparents left behind? Sarkissian is selling them
too."
The sad truth is that the 5.7 million Armenian diaspora, scattered
across Russia, the US, France, Lebanon and many other countries, are the
descendants of the western Armenians who bore the brunt of Turkish Ottoman
brutality in 1915.
Tiny, landlocked, modern-day Armenia - its population a mere 3.2
million, living in what was once called eastern Armenia - is poor, flaunts a
dubious version of democracy and is deeply corrupt. It relies on remittances
from its wealthier cousins overseas; hence Mr Sarkissian's hopeless mission
to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Beirut and Rostov-on-Don to persuade them
to support the treaty, to be signed by the Armenian and Turkish Foreign
Ministers in Switzerland.
The Turks have also been trumpeting a possible settlement to the
territory of Nagorno-Karabagh, part of historic Armenia seized from
Azerbaijan by Armenian militias almost two decades ago - not without a
little ethnic cleansing by Armenians, it should be added. But it is the
refusal of the Yerevan government to make Turkey's acknowledgement of the
genocide a condition of talks that has infuriated the diaspora.
"The Armenian government is trying to sweeten the taste for us by
suggesting that Turkish and Armenian historians sit down to decide what
happened in 1915," one of the Armenians protesting in Beirut said.
"But would the Israelis maintain diplomatic relations if the German
government suddenly called the Jewish Holocaust into question and suggested
it all be mulled over by historians?"
Betrayal has always been in the air. Barack Obama was the third
successive US President to promise Armenian electors that he would
acknowledge the genocide if he won office - and then to betray them, once
elected, by refusing even to use the word. Despite thunderous denunciations
in the aftermath of the Armenian genocide by Lloyd George and Churchill -
the first British politician to call it a holocaust - the Foreign Office
also now meekly claims that the "details" of the 1915 massacres are still in
question. Yet still the evidence comes in, even from this newspaper's
readers. In a letter to me, an Australian, Robert Davidson, said his
grandfather, John "Jock" Davidson, a First World War veteran of the
Australian Light Horse, had witnessed the Armenian genocide: "He wrote of
the hundreds of Armenian carcasses outside the walls of Homs. They were men,
women and children and were all naked and had been left to rot or be
devoured by dogs.
"The Australian Light Horsemen were appalled at the brutality done to
these people. In another instance his company came upon an Armenian woman
and two children in skeletal condition. She signed to them that the Turks
had cut the throats of her husband and two elder children."
In his new book on Bishop Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, the historian
Peter Balakian (the bishop's great-nephew) records how British soldiers who
had surrendered to the Turks at Kut al-Amara in present-day Iraq and were
sent on their own death march north - of 13,000 British and Indian soldiers,
only 1,600 would survive - had spoken of frightful scenes of Armenian
carnage near Deir ez-Zour, not far from Homs in Syria. "In those vast
deserts," the Bishop said, "they had come upon piles of human bones, crushed
skulls, and skeletons stretched out everywhere, and heaps of skeletons of
murdered children."
When the foreign ministers sit down to sign their protocol in
Switzerland on Saturday, they must hope that blood does not run out of their
pens.
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