As Washington withdraws its troops from Iraq, its military operations in Afghanistan intensify with an increasing death toll and political carnage. This video features a panel discussion on the US strategy in the Middle East and South Asia investigating whether its superpower status has finally been eroded. The Afghanistan and Iraq occupation has unleashed unprecedented havoc in the world in an effort to secure global leadership. This debate investigates the ramifications of the war in the two countries, the moral justifications for it, and analyses the withdrawal of troops from Iraq as a ‘rebranding’ of the occupation.
Things the American government and media don’t let go of. And neither do I.
Iraq
“They’re leaving as heroes. I want them to walk home with pride in their hearts,” declared Col. John Norris, the head of a US Army brigade in Iraq.[1]
It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes of an American, enough to make him choke up.
Enough to make him forget.
But no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured … the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women’s rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives … More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile … The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium … the most awful birth defects … unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up … an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight theAmerican invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia … a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris … through a country that may never be put back together again.
“It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003,” reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.
Let’s just get this out of the way: The CIA doesn’t hire working journalists. Not American ones, anyway. It stopped in 1976 after an embarrassing investigation by Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) revealed that infiltrating news teams was just one of several bad habits dating to the 1950s. But we can’t help imagining the clinking of glasses at a certain Langley, VA, office suite over last week’s provocative Timecover story, the one treating NATO’s Afghanistan war as synonymous with standing up for maimed 18-year-old beauty Bibi Aisha.
A “straightforward reported piece,” Time’s spokesman protested after an Observer investigation explored whether the shocking cover story constituted a questionable strain of advocacy journalism, compromised by bureau chief Aryn Baker's likely profits from NATO-enabled war contracts and ties to an Afghan minister's $100 million investment project. Last week Time’s defense of its work as cooly objective seemed at odds with editor Richard Stengel’s concession, in an Aug. 2 interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, that the no-nose piece carried a “strong point of view.”
When George Bush launched the Iraq War, it was obvious to any observer that we were in that country because they had oil, and our government wanted that oil. But this isn’t the only time that our military has been used to help businesses take control of the natural resources of a country. In fact, it’s happened a lot more than you might think. Mike Papantonio talks about our war addiction, and how US corporations are helping to make these wars self-perpetuating, with David DeGraw, a founding member of the Amped Status blog.
I noted here a couple of weeks ago that I was looking "forward to seeing more of the genuine revelations of heretofore undisclosed crimes that will likely be emerging from the still largely unexplored documents" released by Wikileaks last month. I have not been disappointed. (I’ve also been in the process of revising much of my first reaction to the document dump; but more on that later perhaps.)
As the media froth surrounding the initial appearance of the documents recedes, the nuggets of hard truth become clearer, with diligent researchers digging through the trove. For example, Bretigne Shaffer findssome of the underpinning for the media blitz now obviously under way to reverse the growing public discontent with the war in Afghanistan.
When facts are inconvenient, when international law, human rights and history get in the way, when war crimes can’t easily be justified or explained away, when logic doesn’t help much, the current crop of American political leaders turns to what is now the old reliable: 9/11. We have to fight in Afghanistan because … somehow … it’s tied into what happened on September 11, 2001. Here’s Vice-President Joe Biden: “We know that it was from the space that joins Afghanistan and Pakistan that the attacks of 9/11 occurred.”[1]
Here’s Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): “This is the place [Afghanistan] we were attacked from 9/11.”[2]
Rep. Mike Pence, the third-ranking House Republican, asserted that the revelations in the Wikileaks documents do not change his view of the Afghan conflict, nor does he expect a shift in public opinion. “Back home in Indiana, people still remember where the attacks on 9/11 came from.”[3]
With the welfare state cracking apart and with rising concerns among the citizenry about federal spending and debt, count on federal officials to provoke more overseas crises as a way to frighten people into rallying toward the government. It is an old tried-and-true trick that government officials use to distract people’s attention away from the problems government is causing and toward supporting the government’s efforts to keep people “safe.”
U.S. officials are not the only ones who have used this trick effectively. James Madison pointed out that officials in the Roman Empire did it too: “Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”
In the war on terrorism, fear is the coin of the realm. “Be afraid, be very afraid” has become the standard catcall of the statists.
They don’t call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires for nothing. Just ask Great Britain and Russia. It seems that the U.S. Empire, however, is bound and determined to prove that it’s the exception to that adage.
No matter how bad things get for the Empire, U.S. officials become more and more determined to stay the course and let the chips fall where they may, including the possibility of economic and financial bankruptcy for the United States. Governmental pride and military pride are at stake, after all. How could U.S. officials hold their heads up high around the world if the U.S. Empire exited Afghanistan without having established it as a firm, loyal, stable member of the Empire?
“I am shocked — shocked! — to find gambling is going on in here” – Captain Renault at the gaming tables in Casablanca.
The much ballyhooed dump of intelligence and diplomatic files concerning the Afghan War has been trumpeted as some kind of shocking expose, "painting a different picture" than the official version of events — revelations that are sure to rock the Anglo-American political establishments to their foundations.
The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given 92,000 reports by Wikileaks, including thousands of pages of raw “human intelligence” (i.e., uncorroborated claims and gossip from interested parties and anonymous sources pushing a multitude of agendas), and diplomatic notes passed between the promulgators of the occupation in Washington and their factotums “in country” — reports which you might imagine also purvey a multitude of agendas … not least the supreme agenda of all officials involved in a dubious enterprise: ass-covering.
