Afghanistan has the smell of South Vietnam in 1965 ...by Joseph Galloway

[babylonsister]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/index.php?id=1111

Afghanistan has the smell of South Vietnam in 1965 ...by Joseph Galloway


President Barack Obama this week announced that he was ordering an additional 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan, more than half the reinforcements that ground commanders have been seeking for months.

By providing that half a loaf, the new president hopes to buy some time to absorb and analyze new strategic studies of a protracted, long-neglected war that's been going south on us at an alarming pace.

snip//

What's desperately needed now are a far more subtle definition of what constitutes success in Afghanistan and a simultaneous injection of aid projects to improve the lot of a population that's endured more than three decades of war and civil war.

The greatest need of all is an exit strategy that takes into account the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by neighbors, some of them predatory, who have a keen interest in the outcome — Pakistan, Iran and Russia.

Meanwhile, U.S. commanders are stuck fighting a losing war in a landlocked country with long and insecure supply lines through Pakistan, where rebels and thieves pounce on the vulnerable convoys almost at will — and more troops will need more supplies.

To put it bluntly, Afghanistan today has the smell of South Vietnam in early 1965, just as the U.S. began ramping up for a war that would last a decade and cost the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and as many as 2 million Vietnamese before it ended in our defeat.

It's just one more incredible mess that President Obama has found waiting on his desk, and he understandably appears to want to tread very, very cautiously into this uncharted minefield.

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Best thing to do with a minefield is

STAY THE HELL OUT OF IT!

[eleny]

2. Too many of us remember those days

:(

[tekisui]

3. I might say not enough of us do remember.

:-(

[eleny]

7. Well put

:thumbsup:

[bemildred]

4. Yes, but the US does not smell like the US in 1965.

It isn't going to go on for another 10 years this time.

[babylonsister]

6. You are right, and I agree. This will not resemble Russia in any

way.

[bemildred]

8. Well, I was thinking Vietnam 1965-1975, but yeah.

I just don't see this going on much longer. There are going to be bigger issues to be dealt with than our fake wars in the Middle East.

[Loki]

5. No one has been able to tame Afghanistan.....

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier."
Rudyard Kipling

[Metta]

9. Yes and Obama smells like LBJ trying to act like JFK. We know how well that went.

50,000+ dead on our side alone and years of cancerous defoliation on an innocent country.

[dixiegrrrrl]

10. Quagmire 2 Accomplished

or is it 3?

I lost count.

[Peace Patriot]

11. Crazy, crazy, crazy, CRAZY war--against tribes who've been fighting off invasions for

thousands of years. Ask Alexander the Great. Ask the British. Ask the Russians. "Afghanistan is where empires go to die." That is the truth. It's even crazier than Vietnam, if that can be imagined. The Vietnamese had been fighting off invasion for 5,000 years and mostly succeeding, then threw off the French colonialists at the end of WW II, and would have voted for their revolutionary hero Ho Chi Minh's government, who would have been an ally of the U.S. within the communist world. Ruggedly independent, the Vietnamese would simply not have allowed the Russians or Chinese to dominate them, especially with the U.S. as their ally. That was JFK's plan--neutrality for 'Cold War'-contested countries. He started with Laos. He intended neutral status for Vietnam and Cuba. And Ho Chi Minh would have agreed. He had written letters to the U.S. begging the U.S. to agree to UN-sponsored elections in Vietnam and quoting Jefferson and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Ike (or the CIA) nixed those elections. The CIA started a war, and then dropped that developing war on JFK (as they tried to do with Cuba as well). JFK opened backchannels to Krushchev (after the the Cuban Missile Crisis) aimed at ENDING the "Cold War" and all these proxy wars. This is why the CIA assassinated him.* Two days after his death, LBJ said (of the CIA and the Joint Chiefs), "Now they can have their war."

They wanted to nuke Russia and Cuba. Even LBJ opposed that. The Vietnam War was the WAR PROFITEER ALTERNATIVE.

And I think we are at the same pass right now--I call it the Forever War. It is now the purpose of our "military-industrial complex" to manufacture war indefinitely. These bloodsuckers thrive on war. They have to have war to keep draining our treasury into their pockets. That is what this is about. There is no other reason for it. There is no one that we could kill in Afghanistan that will make us safer. No one! And every week we are bombing more and more civilians. Even our puppet government has complained! And why this is crazier than Vietnam is that we are dealing with a people whose religion connects them with a worldwide Islamic jihad. What are we going to do--nuke them all? Every day we remain in Afghanistan, we make hundreds more potential terrorists. It is lose-lose. There is NO WIN. It is nuts. It is madness. And we are throwing gasoline on the fire, in a region with two nuclear powers--India and Pakistan.

This writer says that Aghanistan's neighbors are "predatory." Gawd! Who is predatory? Who?. 'We have met the enemy--and he is us!' Get it? WE are the country who has slaughtered one million innocent people to steal their oil!

So NOW we're dealing with the convergence of the "military-industrial complex" AND the multinational corporations like Exxon Mobil who operate from our shores. We are their slaves, their peons, their cannon fodder. We have really no say whatever about their wars--done in our name, with our tax dollars. Afghanistan is about war profiteering AND the gas pipeline--with the hidden profiteering in heroine.

About a week ago, I saw some Pentagon announcement about their new justification for staying in Aghanistan--the "war on drugs." Now, after 8 years of a flourishing heroin trade (which the Taliban had put a stop to, prior to our invasion), they've suddenly gotten religion about drugs. Jeez! It took the U.S. military to re-start the heroin trade. Now they want to wipe it out. It would be hilarious, if people weren't getting blown to bits daily because of these lies.

This is just crap--like everything else they say.

--------------

*(See James Douglass' new book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.")