[Peace-discuss] excerpt from bill lind on afghanistan

[E. Wayne Johnson]

The dollar really may be quite dead as the international reserve currency,
and the results will be catastrophic, particularly as related to the 
purchase of oil. 

We saw last summer poor starving countries exporting foodstuffs because 
of market conditions.
Now imagine a condition where US dollars don't compete well for oil and 
the US becomes
an oil exporter (except for trade barriers forbidding it). 

I agree that the US is at least as much after the flow of oil as 
influence, but what Lind is
calling modernity (up-ending of traditional culture) I would call 
American Imperialism,
but it seems that the culprits in the imperialism extend beyond the US 
borders.

There was an article in the news yesterday about a UN group complaining 
that traditional
Afghani law is demeaning to women.  Regardless of one's stand on the 
issue of traditional
Afghani law, it should not be hard to understand that the Afghans prefer 
to find their own
way and would fight against any meddling from the outside.

The US government (I really want to refrain from saying "we") is very 
much in the same pickle
that the Russians got into regarding Afghanistan.  I marvel at the 
stupidity of armies and I must
say that either Tolstoy was a genius or he was familiar with the works 
of a genius.





C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> Lind buys the propaganda of those he rightly criticizes if he thinks 
> the fight
> is between "believers in a ... future in which everyone on earth 
> becomes modern"
> and "billions of people are willing to fight to the death against 
> modernity" -- unless "modernity" is reduced to meaning "doing what the 
> USG says."  It's closer to right (if still not correct) to say it's a 
> fight over oil. --CGE
>
>
> E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>> William Lind is a military strategist actually rather opposed to war, 
>> particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. He writes on
>> LewRockwell.com this morning about the folly of the Obama 
>> Administrations
>> plans for *"**a major, long-term military and civilian program to 
>> reinvent Afghanistan from one of the most backward, least developed 
>> nations to a
>> relatively prosperous democratic state."* 
>> http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind158.html
>>
>> No surprises there.  The most interesting part of Lind's article (to 
>> me) is
>> the conclusion:
>>
>> *...Here we see how little "change" the Obama administration really 
>> represents. The differences between the neo-liberals and the neo-cons 
>> are
>> few. Both are militant believers in Brave New World, a Globalist 
>> future in
>> which everyone on earth becomes modern. In the view of these 
>> ideologues, the
>> fact that billions of people are willing to fight to the death against
>> modernity is, like the river Pregel, an unimportant military 
>> obstacle. We
>> just need to buy more Predators.*
>>
>> *Meanwhile, the money is running out. The/ ancien//regime/ syndrome 
>> looms
>> ever larger: we not only maintain but increase foolish foreign 
>> commitments,
>> at the same time that debt is piling up, those willing to lend become 
>> fewer
>> and we are reduced to debasing the currency. Historians have seen it all
>> before, many, many times. It never has a happy ending.*
>>
>> *It appears Afghanistan will be the graveyard of yet another empire.*
>>
>
>