Even if we "win" the war in Afghanistan, it won't affect the efforts of Al Qaeda who want to concentrate on Pakistan. The more we fight, the greater the resentment of the Afghan people. Let the Afghans stop the corruption themselves. We know from our worldwide experiences that even first world countries such as Israel have rampant corruption with the former Prime Minister Oldmert, but not the first, to be indicted for corruption crimes.
We can't change the world so we need to be very selective in where we intervene. These wars have weakened our country and kept our so-called Defense Industries rich including Cheney who has millions of shares of Halliburton which received, by far, the largest contracts at the start of the Bush/Cheney War in Iraq. As I said, the same deficient pre-frontal cortical judgement brain function that makes people overly religious about a God or Belief and corrupt at the same time. It is great during brutal wars because we are not inhibited in killing others, some of whom were former friends as we had seen in the Serbs vs Muslim Bosnians war or the current Israeli-Palestinian wars and our wars in Latin America, Vietnam, Iraq, Mexico, Cuba, Iran, and Afghanistan. We had no good reason to go to war in Afghanistan in the first place no matter what most Americans think. All wars have a profit motive. Afghanistan is no longer a profitable war.
Jim Kawakami, Sept 29, 2009, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
TUESDAY SEPT. 29, 2009 10:30 EDT
Talking about Iran on the TV
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
Earlier this morning, I was on MSNBC, on Dylan Ratigan's Morning Meeting program, discussing Iran. Although I didn't know beforehand, the person charged with making the case that Iran is a Grave Threat was . . . Arianna Huffington. Also on the panel was Washington Post Editorial Page writer Jonathan Capehart. Here's what ensued: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEuxel6Fv-0
Just today, a columnist in Capehart's paper, Richard Cohen, suggests we may have to attack Iran. Over the weekend, another columnist in Capehart's newspaper, David Ignatius, beat his chest and roared: "It’s hard to see how this one will end short of military confrontation if the Iranians don’t start bargaining for real." Last week, Capehart's Editorial Page published an attack-Iran Op-Ed from two former Senators (one from each party) who have spent the last year advocating a detailed plan for blockading, attacking, bombing and invading that country. The same day, Capehart's boss, Editorial Page Deputy Editor Jackson Diehl, said that Israel's so-called "success" in its attack on Gaza may/should create the view that "even a partial and short-term reversal of the Iranian nuclear program [via an air attack] may look to Israelis like a reasonable benefit."
And, oh yeah -- we're currently occupying two Muslim countries on either side of Iran, having invaded them many years ago. There's nothing Iran has done that we and our clients/allies haven't done ourselves to a far greater extent. But remember: it's Iran that is run by people with crazy, belligerent, fanatical, war-loving sentiments and is therefore a grave threat to world peace (imagine if Iran had invaded, bombed and then spent the last eight years militarily occupying Canada and Mexico, only for Iranian media elites to keep insisting that it was the U.S. that was the rogue state run by aggressive fanatics who threatened world peace).
UPDATE: This person points out the irony that -- unbeknownst to me -- the entire time when I was speaking, MSNBC was flashing scary video of Iran testing its missiles (though it omitted video of this andthis), interspersed with this melodramatic and frightening caption:It's genuinely hard to overstate the effect of visuals like this, transmitted over and over and over to a population. And that's on the "liberal" MSNBC.
UPDATE II: Also worth watching: Scott Ritter, this morning on Democracy Now, discussing the hysteria being generated about Iran.
UPDATE III: In Salon today, Juan Cole documents the numerous myths being used to feed hysteria over Iran, and -- yet again -- debunks the claim that Iran has been threatening a first-strike against Israel.
-- Glenn Greenwald
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