Addicted to war
Empire Burlesque
by Chris Floyd
08/11/09
Looks like the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan is morphing even more directly into the ‘Drug War’ that the U.S. government has been waging all over the world — and especially against its own people — for almost 40 years now, with all the attendant aggrandizement of authoritarian powers and degradation of civil liberties and human rights. … Of course, the runaway cultivation of opium in Afghanistan — which is now flooding not only the West but also vast swathes of Central Asia with cheap heroin — is a direct result of the American invasion in 2001: an operation ostensibly designed to capture Osama bin Laden, who somehow curiously slipped away from the Americans’ curiously porous encirclement, never to be seen again (except of course for a few curiously timed transmission that seemed, curiously enough, to be geared to the domestic political needs of America’s militarist factions)...
http://tinyurl.com/nu65zb
The thirty years’ war
The Nation
by Robert Dreyfuss
08/12/09
With great anticipation, I trucked over to the posh St. Regis Hotel, just north of the White House, to see Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his team at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress. I shouldn’t have bothered. The weird thing about the event is that in the room were literally hundreds of the Washington foreign policy elite, current and former officials, people with lots of experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and, of course, journalists, too. And Holbrooke brought with him literally his entire team, minus a few who couldn’t be there: top regional experts such as Barnett Rubin and Vali Nasr, and about a dozen other members of Holbrooke’s Af-Pak task force. But the session was boring, pedestrian, and so mind-numbingly simplistic that it seemed like Holbooke and Co. were talking to third graders. And their goal was to convince us that the ‘civilians’ involved in the Thirty Years’ War in Afghanistan can rebuild that shattered nation from the ground up. They didn’t convince me...
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/461776/the_thirty_years_war
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Af-Pak
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Richard+Holbrooke
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=war+on+drugs
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=civil+liberties
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Chris+Floyd
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Robert+Dreyfuss
by Chris Floyd
08/11/09
Looks like the ‘Good War’ in Afghanistan is morphing even more directly into the ‘Drug War’ that the U.S. government has been waging all over the world — and especially against its own people — for almost 40 years now, with all the attendant aggrandizement of authoritarian powers and degradation of civil liberties and human rights. … Of course, the runaway cultivation of opium in Afghanistan — which is now flooding not only the West but also vast swathes of Central Asia with cheap heroin — is a direct result of the American invasion in 2001: an operation ostensibly designed to capture Osama bin Laden, who somehow curiously slipped away from the Americans’ curiously porous encirclement, never to be seen again (except of course for a few curiously timed transmission that seemed, curiously enough, to be geared to the domestic political needs of America’s militarist factions)...
http://tinyurl.com/nu65zb
The thirty years’ war
The Nation
by Robert Dreyfuss
08/12/09
With great anticipation, I trucked over to the posh St. Regis Hotel, just north of the White House, to see Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and his team at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress. I shouldn’t have bothered. The weird thing about the event is that in the room were literally hundreds of the Washington foreign policy elite, current and former officials, people with lots of experience in the Middle East and South Asia, and, of course, journalists, too. And Holbrooke brought with him literally his entire team, minus a few who couldn’t be there: top regional experts such as Barnett Rubin and Vali Nasr, and about a dozen other members of Holbrooke’s Af-Pak task force. But the session was boring, pedestrian, and so mind-numbingly simplistic that it seemed like Holbooke and Co. were talking to third graders. And their goal was to convince us that the ‘civilians’ involved in the Thirty Years’ War in Afghanistan can rebuild that shattered nation from the ground up. They didn’t convince me...
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/461776/the_thirty_years_war
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Af-Pak
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Richard+Holbrooke
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=war+on+drugs
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=civil+liberties
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Chris+Floyd
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Robert+Dreyfuss
rudkla - 13. Aug, 10:57
