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I really think that someone has been massively aerosol spraying the ‘Mission Accomplished’ meme all over the western media. Newsflash bitches: Iraq is still broken and not getting better.
“At least four people have been killed and dozens wounded in a bombing at the provincial government building in the Iraqi city of Ramadi.
Police sources told Al Jazeera that a female suicide bomber entered the deputy governor’s office and blew herself up.”
I am thinking that people blowing themselves up in your parliament buildings is not usually a sign of peaceable progress toward a democratic state.
“More than 20 people were wounded in the blast.
“At least four people were killed and 23 others wounded, including women and children, by a female suicide bomber at the entrance to the provincial government building,” an interior ministry official said.”
Mission Accomplished, indeed. Is this the climate for any sort of reasonable governance to take place?
“Violence in the region has dropped from its peak in 2006 and 2007, but bombings and assassinations remain common.”
Err. No. The situation in Iraq is like trying to paint your house during a rainstorm and the only solution you can think of is using more paint.
“Many Iraqis worry that the ongoing political impasse, with no one able to form a government four months after parliamentary elections, will lead to increased violence.”
Whoa, no functioning government for four months? You think that little tidbit would be making the rounds on CNN and MSNBC. I would think that a nation’s imperialist conquests would be of utmost concern, or at least page two news once and awhile.
I really wish someone in the massive american military industrial complex had done their homework. Iraq was held together by an authoritarian secular regime that actively repressed the various cultural and religious in the region. Did they think that everyone would just kiss and make up after being repressed for so long? How would a democracy function in a society split along almost diametrically opposed religious and cultural fault lines?
Kinda like a chaotic higglety pigglety mess would be my estimation.
It will come down to this sooner or later. All the boots on the ground and drone strikes in the world will not magically solve the Afghanistan problem for the west. Unless we as the so called civilized nations of the West decide to turn Afghanistan into nuclear slag, achieving complete victory(?) will be impossible. A former British Commander in the Afghan theatre said:
“The head of the British Army says he believes talks with the Taliban should begin “pretty soon,” but that discussions shouldn’t lead insurgents to think they have an advantage.
Calling his position a “purely private view,” Gen. Sir David Richards told the BBC on Sunday that he didn’t know when talks could begin. But Richards, a former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said, “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be looking at that sort of thing pretty soon.”
About time, in my opinion. Invading Afghanistan was pure folly in the first place, as any student of history can tell you. Even the general is getting cold feet.:
“He said in any counter-insurgency campaign, there comes “a point [at] which you start to negotiate with each other.”
Yet, we went ahead with visions of protecting democracy and fighting terrorism dancing in our heads. Yet another great imperial army has more than met its match in Afghanistan. The sooner we leave the better.
Aerial Death for you Evil Doers!
It is really crappy when the people you are killing decide to return the favour, Hillary Clinton is outraged at the audacity of people who are being bombed a couple of times a week that they might want to strike back, how dare they:
“We’ve made it very clear that, if, heaven forbid, an attack like this, if we can trace back to Pakistan, were to have been successful, there would be very serious consequences,” Clinton said on CBS News’ 60 Minutes programme last week.
Yeppers, watch out. It is the US who wields the stick, at all times. Or the US Proxy forces that must be eager to toss their people into the gapping bloody maw of the neo-imperialist war machine. Observe the pressure placed on Pakistan to get their people out there to die for US policy.
“And behind the scenes, the US is also reportedly pressuring Pakistan to launch a fresh military offensive in North Waziristan.”
Evil Doers are out there, and you need to go git’em!
“Many analysts say that recent history is not encouraging: Drone strikes and several major Pakistani army offensives have succeeded in inflaming public opinion, but they have failed to dislodge the Taliban or al-Qaeda.
Huh, accidentally killing innocent people inflames public opinion? Who would have guessed? Of course it just the opinion of the people who are being bombed, if they have not read the US Foreign Policy handout telling them that this murderous war is officially a “good thing” then they simply need to get with the pogrom program. Thankfully, the casualties are all foreigners, otherwise we would have a real problem stateside.
It is okay though, the US is consolidating the military gains made in Afghanistan securing large portions of the country as safe from harm. Or not.
“The Swat Valley offensive last year displaced more than two million people from their homes. Most have returned, according to the Pakistani government – but many of the returnees say the government is not providing basic services, notably security and housing.
“Widespread insecurity has also allowed the Taliban to return to previously-cleared areas in the Swat Valley.
Even if Pakistan launches an offensive there is no guarantee it will be able to hold and consolidate its gains – particularly if eastern Afghanistan, just across the border from North Waziristan, remains insecure.
“The Pakistanis acknowledge that they haven’t been able to do [counterinsurgency]. But the Nato failure on the other side of the border is just as obvious,” said Hassan Abbas, a professor at Columbia University and a former Pakistani government official.”
Whoops! Perhaps the US should begin establishing strategic hamlets so we can sort out who is good and who is evil. It has worked effectively in the past, so why not now?
Of course, intensifiying the conflict will only make things better:
“The US, meanwhile, has already accelerated its aerial bombing campaign in the tribal regions: Suspected drone strikes have already occurred 35 times this year, compared with 53 attacks in all of 2009, according to the Washington-based New America Foundation, which maintains a comprehensive database of the strikes.
“That seems to be the alternative plan: In case the Pakistani army refuses to go into North Waziristan, the US will intensify its drone strikes,” said Abdul Basit, a researcher at the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies in Islamabad.
But the drone strikes have not decapitated the TTP; the group continues to terrorise Pakistan, and some US officials
Your home and relatives destroyed, love the War on Terror
acknowledge that the drone strikes have made the Taliban more determined to strike targets in the US.”
The blowback is festering and growing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“It is too early to tell what caused his radicalisation, but there are reports that he was motivated – at least in part – by anger over US drone strikes.
A larger US military presence in Pakistan could have a similarly negative effect on public opinion.
“I don’t see what more boots on the ground will do … in terms of bolstering the military’s capacity to fight the TTP,” said Sameer Lalwani, a research fellow at the New America Foundation.”
Afghanistan will be yet another untimely end to an imperialist power. The rails are greased and the US is already on the downward trajectory.
When all is said and done in Haiti will things change? Or will the status quo remain? Media Lens has done a excellent job at giving a short historical primer about Haiti and Western intervention within the small island nation.
“In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:”Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters. In Haiti’s case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti’s poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.” (Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008)”
The short form is that, we have chosen profit over people in Haiti. The results are obvious, endemic poverty, economic ruin, desperate people.
“Aristide’s balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years“. (Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994)”
Yet another grim legacy written in unnecessary human suffering. When we are blind to history, when our media institutions promote, rather than banish, lies and approved truth we lose an important part of our character; our empathy and compassion. Our motivations to help others are not activated because the suffering is cloaked in the twin grey falsehoods of nationalistic myth and self-serving rationalizations.
We owe Haiti much more than emergency aid. We owe them their country and their right to self-determination.
The British PM Gordon Brown wants Hamid Karzai to clean up corruption. Brown said:
“I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption,” Brown said in speech at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London.”
This should be referenced in light of the recent attack in Helmand province in which an Afghan police officer shot and killed 5 British soldiers and escaped into the countryside.
“The soldiers concerned were mentoring Afghan national police. They were working inside and living inside an Afghan national police checkpoint, just outside Nad-e-Ali district centre,” Lt.-Col. David Wakefield, spokesman for the British forces, told Sky News. “It is our initial understanding that an individual Afghan policeman possibly acting in conjunction with one other started firing inside the checkpoint before fleeing from the scene.”
Occupying a country certainly is more difficult if when they keep turning on you and killing your soldiers. We are not going to see another British Colonial India in Afghanistan. The governments of the West are deluding themselves if they think they can install some local panjandrum and then rule quietly behind the scenes. It just will not happen, ask the Russians how much fun ‘ruling’ Afghanistan is. Perhaps the British have more insight? Doubtful.
But back to cleaning up corruption; or more specifically how to do so when it is your presence that is causing the massive corruption in the first place?
We should not be kidding ourselves. The West’s military presence in Afghanistan is creating more problems than it is solving and should be withdrawn immediately. If the Taliban, which we created and armed so well in the 1980’s, presents itself to be a problem then we should negotiate with them to broker an agreement without having to slaughter innocents in the process.
There is no way for the West to “win” in Afghanistan, we should begin reparations and move on as soon as possible.
I think I am going to get this book. This review makes me think this work is along the same lines as much of Noam Chomsky’s work.
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Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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