The US – Islam War nears halfway mark

I have to do more research, but I’m pretty sure October 7, 2009 should mark the HALFWAY POINT of the US-ISLAM WAR. I realize the Pentagon brass are calling for fifty years more of insurgency suppression in Afghanistan and Iraq, but if we grant them no more time than for America’s longest military intervention, we’ve got another eight years before beating our humiliating retreat.
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Those who insist we could have won the Vietnam War, would have our murderous troops there still. No foreign occupation has succeeded in modern times, with the ongoing exception of Israel, which by its swallowing of Palestine has been skewing the definition of occupation to the Old Testament model of mass extermination. The treacherous method worked against the Native Americans, it may still doom the (Palestinian) Native Israelis.

Afghanistan and Iraq remain occupations, where Vichy puppet governments prosecute genocide against the native resistance. How long before Americans lose their stomach for continuous bloody repression? I cannot account for the Russians in Chechnya, but on the US-Islam front, we are halfway there.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, we may already have surpassed half the civilian death tolls in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It’s hard to say, the US “doesn’t do body counts” now, and we didn’t then either. Our own military casualties grew exponentially in Vietnam. If such statistics bear comparison, today’s numbers cannot be but comparable.

It’s being whispered that American casualties are approaching a multiple of a thousand mark. Official soldier deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are conjectured to be reaching a round number.

I’m not told how many US mercenaries are being killed. We have as many hired-guns contracted as government soldiers. Want to lay odds on how many body bags they’ve required?

Nor are we told how many US soldiers are being wounded, many of them with injuries which would not have sustained their lives in Vietnam. Surely there is a sad gray area of injury which we could round up as it approximates death.

Polly put the kettle on

Greg Mortenson in KhandayThere is nothing more thrilling than being the wild one on the outer edge of the pack, seeing the horizon more clearly than those safely ensconced in the middle of the herd. It isn’t easy being a lonely maverick, relying on animal instinct to find hidden dangers, while other more domesticated souls happily munch nuggets of truth dispensed by politicians and mainstream media. But someone has to lead the way.

I thought I’d found an opportunity to indulge my inner maverick. I had high hopes that the Three Cups of Tea avalanche was hiding lots of neocon propaganda, a pitiful campaign to convince those of us with bleeding hearts that, indeed, our government is engaged in noble warfare against terrorism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the training ground for Islamic fundamentalists determined to wipe out Western culture. After all, who would know the terrorist’s heart better than Greg Mortenson who has spent much of the past fifteen years in remote Himalayan villages developing relationships with local leaders and gaining an understanding of these tribal cultures?

Well, I’m disappointed to admit that, after finishing the book, I am smack in the middle of the Mortenson love fest. Other than forgetfulness, disorganization and a chronic lack of punctuality, I can find no fault with this man (I feel like Pontius Pilate). After the 9/11 attacks, the book gets a whole lot better. The writing, literally painful to read in the first half, begins to flow in such a way that you are not constantly mindful of the fact that you are reading.

Political intrigue, physical danger, unflinching bravery, and an uncanny ability to discern the good guys from the bad guys–always in pursuit of his mission of educating the rural poor–does make Mortenson seem larger than life. So much so that co-author David Oliver Relin stops mentioning his physical stature in every paragraph.

The complexity of tribal societies makes for interesting reading. Puppet governments in big cities have no standing in remote mountain villages. Tribal councils and religious leaders in Iran interpret and enforce the law. Mortenson makes an interesting distinction between warlords who take tariffs from opium smugglers to create private militias and commandhan who plow the profits into the people’s welfare. One bad, the other good. He makes few moral judgments of the mountain people and their ways, poppy production included. He saves his scathing indictments for the US government and its minions, and seemingly refuses to cooperate or be used by them in any way.

I hope I can find a front row seat tonight and catch Mortenson’s eye. I want to give him the oft-sought-but-ever-elusive Mango wink of approval. Some maverick, she.

What Bush and Osama together have taught the world

September 11 was important in world history, because Osama bin Laden taught the world that resistance to US domination was most effectively fought on US soil, and not the soil of the world’s oppressed nations.

Seems simple enough, but most victims of US foreign policy up to then had fought back directly against their own US propped-up puppet governments. Osama bin Laden globalized the resistance to US imperial policies by taking the fight to US soil. His message? Not to let D.C. fight the war solely on your home territories.

The 9/11 attacks might have not alone taught the world much of anything, if there had not been the Bush Adminstration team in office. That was the genius of Osama. He knew how elite American arrogance would most likely respond, being of elite lineage himself. He knew that the US ruling class would tend to try to destroy this new resistance against their world domination by using pure and total violence, much as the ruling class in Osama’s native Saudi Arabia does when threatened. But pure violence is dangerous since it tends to overheat like a nuclear meltdown occurring within the core of a reactor.

At present glance, it appears that nothing much has changed. The response of the Bush Administration to 9/11 was to up the level of violence against the peoples of the Third World states of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and next Lebanon No new attacks have occurred on American soil meanwhile. And as usual, there have been yet new hundreds of thousands of victims of the US military and its ME Frankenstein, the state of Israel’s IDF. The European governments have done their part, as junior cheerleaders of the US mandated blood bath outside their own continent.

But what will be the ultimate cost that the American people will eventually pay for sitting by and silently allowing its corporate-run government to go bezerk after 9/11? I talk not of the trillions of dollars in national debt that is being run off, but rather of the fact that the Bush Adminstration has practically guaranteed that Osama’s message did take root in the populations of the world.

Osama said let’s start a dirty war of attrition against the US rulers on their home soil. Osama had the ability to give the lesson that this was the Achille’s heel of US imperialism, but he didn’t have the organization to do much more than just explode one big bonfire or two for the passive and impoverished crowd he was trying to wake up to see. Bush has now given this previously dormant crowd the knowledge of the technique to create one, two, a thousand mini or maximum 9/11s in the years ahead.

It does not involve airports nor planes, And the world is more awake now. It is probably only a matter of weeks, or months at best, before the war stirs once again on the US mainland soil, but this time with newer techniques learned on Afghan and Iraqi soil. The ultimate price to be paid by Americans for their acceptance of this carnage, is that the carnage will most likely hit our soil once again, just like it hit New York previously.

So let’s look some at the new techniques to wage war on American soil. Let’s look at the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), which is close cousin to the cluster bomb. The IED has accounted for about 1/3 of the US casualties in Iraq. The components of an IED are cheap and its materials easily found. And let us not think that only Muslims can use these devices within the US. Anybody can.

Ex- US soldiers can come back and construct them. Hispanics tired of the US messing with their countries can put them together. Gang members trafficking in illegal substances and human flesh can do the same. That’s what a dirty war is all about. The weak use weaker weapons against the more powerful, but weapons they do begin to use. Iraq plus 9/11 = the ability and desire by yet more people, to use cheap weapons against the US government on US soil. Bush has given that little shove that was needed to make Osama’s lesson to the world more effective.

These IEDs are what has been giving the Iraqi resistance its sharpening edge. But where might this dirty war of attrition begin to play out in yet another battlefield? See William S. Lind’s commentary, The Boomerang Effect that shows how one scenario most likely might occur.

Osama taught us that what goes around comes around. Americans have just yet to learn that lesson, though the Bush Klan is determined that we certainly will. Dubya, Dick, and Donald helped the world find the most hard to stop weapon that could be used against the American people. The IED. The lesson was learned in Iraq, but the whole world has been watching.

Lebanon and Mexico- Iraq and Afghanistan

It was a coincidence of sorts, but last Friday both Lebanon and Mexico found themselves engulfed in 2 huge demonstrations for basically the same reasons. Both demonstrations had as their goals getting rid of their undemocratically minded, US propped up governments.

Both demonstrations were demanding that the governments they have forced upon them at present, stop doing the bidding of the Bush Adminstration in D.C. As a result, it has been difficult in the US getting news about these huge rallies, and what commentaries I have seen in the US press border on the absurd.

As example, on Lebanon’s demonstration of approximately 1 million in the streets of Beirut, The CS Gazette carried a conservative Chicago tribune editorial that it passed off as reportage (Sat A3), that began… “After last year’s Cedar Revolution, the counter-revolution began Friday.” Pure bullshit, and typical of the Right Wing nuts at The Gazette to print this nonsense. The demands of this demonstration were for a non-representative Lebanese government that is cooperating with a foreign power, the US, to resign. Nothing counter-revolutionary about that demonstration at all, and the crowd was huge.

They were demonstrating against a government that is seen as cooperating with the US and another power, Israel, that invaded Lebanese territory and left unexploded cluster bombs everywhere. Plus, they don’t want a UN sent in by the US providing defense for another Israeli-US attack on fellow Muslim countries, Syria and Iran. Plus, they just plain want the US out of Iraq. This is a revolutionary group of people, not countrer-revolutionary as the Chicago Tribune article asserts. It always gets me when Right Wingers call their opposites ‘counter-revolutionaries’! I imagine Hitler did quite the same.

Now, let’s turn to Mexico, and see the exact same situation, and the exact same idiotic commentary inside The Gazette. Several hundred thousand demonstrated against this new, and fraudulently installed, president Fecal (FElipe CALderon). He had to be snuck in at a secret ceremony at midnight, and the national chambers of government had already been engulfed in fistfights and chaos because of the reality that a recount was denied the Mexican people, in a dubious presidential electoral processs full of illegalities. The outgoing president refused to publicly give his departure speech and instead handed it in on paper! So what does our local whigs have to say about all this, despite they hardly being able to locate Mexico on a map?

Metro section Page 6, Gazette editorial- “Mexico made progress in Fox’s six years, but now Calderon must move the country further toward a free market system and confront the increasing violoence that plagues the country.” Oh brother. The country is plagued by violence because of the government that The Gazette is supporting. In fact, to twist this reality around as this editorial does, is simply to call for Calderon to move in a manner even more repressively, to crush by yet more state terrorism, the resistance to this US puppet government. Shame on these idiots at The Gazette!

And just how damn dumb are these assholes on the editorial board there? Mexico has ‘a free market system’ already. What did they think Mexico was, the Soviet Union? What a bunch of overly miseducated twits The Gazette has stacking their editorial pages with this juvenile nonsense. They see socialism when the reality has been completely the opposite. Mexico has always been a capitalist country, and it’s been staring The Gazette in the face for decades now.

Free Lebanon and Mexico of US government stooges. These 2 puppet governments currently in power are causing thier respective peoples untold harm. Stop the US from waging yet more war in both Latin America, and the Middle East. US out of Mexico and Lebanon. US out of Iraq and Afghanistan!