In President Obama’s speech, Tuesday night, he envisioned an exit strategy from Afghanistan while announcing that he’s sending 30 thousand more troops to General McChrystal’s command in that country.
Is envisioning an exit strategy anything like fighting a virtual war?
In Google’s free dictionary “envision” is defined as: to picture in the mind, to conceive of as a possibility. It gives, as an example, “I can see a risk in this strategy”.
I think the free dictionary has it right.
Obama’s problem is: how do you keep a war going when there is no reason for it? Well, maybe there is a reason; the profits of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.
We’re coming to a crucial stage in the Afghanistan war. Escalate or get out. Obama is trying to have it both ways.
What we can envision is a Vietnam-like ending to this war. Experts have already warned us on numerous occasions that this war cannot be won militarily. There has to be some kind of political solution. Sorry Barack. You took the job. You have to carry out the orders of the oligarchy. This is a necessary war to keep these corporate entities in business.
An oligarchy is defined by the same free dictionary as a form of government in which power effectively rests with an elite segment of society. The word is derived from the Greek for “few” and “rule”.
Modern democracies can morph into oligarchies when actual differences between viable political rivals are small and politicians’ careers depend heavily on unelected economic and media elites.
Corporate oligarchies are formed when power is captured by an elite group of insiders or influential economic entities such as banks or industries, with little regard for constitutionally protected rights.
President Barack Obama is now the figurehead for America’s corporate oligarchy.
Barack Obama is a man without a heart or soul but with great rhetoric, master of the platitude and the cliché. Upon taking office, he picked Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, known for his hawkish foreign policy and a reputed operative for the military-industrial complex, as one of his closest advisors; or maybe it was the military-industrial oligarchy that picked Obama.
Obama made his pitch, Tuesday night, to 4000 cadets of the US Military Academy at West Point.
He used all the threadbare reasons for this new escalation of the war; reverse Taliban gains, protect the Afghan people from attack, provide time for them to build their own military capacity, increase pressure on al Qaeda in Pakistan and so on. He seemed to be in a hurry to get through the speech, taking up only 37 minutes. The cadets didn’t demonstrate much enthusiasm, applauding lightly only twice.
Obama envisioned the de-escalation beginning in 2011. Using the old saw again, he said it was time the Afghans took more responsibility for their country. So, was Obama able to eat his cake and have it, too?
With the country in near economic free-fall, why doesn’t our Dear Leader do something to fix this country and let the Afgans take care of themselves?
Actually, the Taliban is one of the political entities of Afghanistan, like the Republican Party in this USA. So why does Obama vow to “break the Taliban”. He’s using it as a scapegoat to keep the war going. He can certainly find something better to do, like make sure there is a public option in the new Health Care Reform bill working its way through Congress – or better still, fight for the Singer Payer Plan.
Norman D. Livergood says in “The New Enlightenment”: “In actuality, the basic social structure of the United States consists of the production of armaments by the ‘defense industry’ and the destruction of armaments in fabricated wars.”
“Wars are not ‘caused’ by a crisis such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or nonexistent weapons of mass destruction; wars are contrived for political-economic purposes by those in power.”
STEPHEN FLEISCHMAN, writer-producer-director of documentaries, spent thirty years in Network News at CBS and ABC. His memoir is now in print. See www.amahchewahwah.com, e-mail stevefl@ca.rr.com