[Peace-discuss] Fw: This is good-WikiLeaks Documents Expose Obama's Brutal Afghan War, White House Threatens and Blames the Messengers

[David Johnson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: David Sladky 
To: undisclosed-recipients: 
Sent: Sunday, August 01, 2010 4:50 PM
Subject: This is good-WikiLeaks Documents Expose Obama's Brutal Afghan War, White House Threatens and Blames the Messengers





WikiLeaks Documents Expose Obama's Brutal Afghan War, White House Threatens and Blames the Messengers
Wed, 07/28/2010 - 12:48 — Glen Ford
  a.. Afghan war | 
  b.. Af-Pak War | 
  c.. WikiLeaks | 
  d.. ba radio commentary

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

The White House has reached new lows in evading responsibility for Obama's wars. In the wake of the recent WikiLeaks, administration minions now distance the president from the conduct of the Afghan war prior to December, 2009 - eleven months into office. "It is as if White House minions think that all President Obama need do to absolve himself from the crimes of his wars, is to announce a 'new strategy.'"

 

White House Fear and Loathing Over War and WikiLeaks

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

"The Obama crew is behaving both more cowardly and more cynically than their Republican predecessors in the White House."

Barack Obama and his handlers think they are magicians, that they can somehow snap their fingers and separate the president from the wars he has embraced and expanded. In attempting to distance Commander-in-Chief Obama from his own wars - the sordid details of which are contained in 90,000 pages of documents released by WikiLeaks - the Obama crew is behaving both more cowardly and more cynically than their Republican predecessors in the White House. The Bush men were barbaric racists, crude cowboys whose naked American hyper-nationalism, and gross disdain for and ignorance of everyone one else on the planet was ultimately too heavy a burden for the empire to bear. They had to go, in order for the empire to live. 

George Bush - and, especially, former Vice President Dick Cheney - never denied ownership of their ghastly wars. They were proud of having unleashed hell on Earth, having devoted every waking hour to the project since at least September 11th, 2001. Bush and Cheney and the rest are certainly war criminals deserving the most extreme punishments sanctioned by civilized humanity - but they are proud and defiant criminals.

Not the Obama team, which tries to wage aggressive, imperial wars while ducking and hiding from responsibility for those wars. When the avalanche of WikiLeaks documents descended, the White House trotted out National Security Adviser James Jones, who essentially said: These papers are about somebody else's wars, not my boss, President Obama. The documents cover the period from January 2004 to December 2009 - that is, about eleven months into Obama's presidency. General Jones tries to disavow everything that happened in Afghanistan before Obama announced his "new strategy" in December of 2009. It is as if White House minions think that all President Obama need do to absolve himself from the crimes of his wars, is to announce a "new strategy." Even George Bush was not so cynical. 

"Obama now disavows the first year of his own administration's conduct of the Afghanistan war."

But this behavior is typical Obama, who told his corporate and military allies early on in his campaign that he wasn't opposed to war, only to "stupid wars." He now disavows the first year of his own administration's conduct of the Afghanistan war, even though he embraced it as a "good" war and expanded it deeper into Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than George Bush ever dared. Apparently, the first Obama war year is now to be considered part of Bush's "dumb war" days, and the official Obama war is now dated from December, 2009. Or so we are expected to believe. 

The entire White House posture is so pitiful, it's almost funny, in a ghoulish sort of way. WikiLeaks releases a torrent of secret U.S. documents, and the White House complains that WikiLeaks should have checked with the U.S. government, first - the same people that wanted to keep the gory details of war a secret from the public. That's like an organized crime family claiming that the cops ought to get permission from the Don before digging up the buried bodies of mob victims. In this case, of course, the bodies are in the millions. 

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com.
 
  a.. Login or register to post comments
Comments 
A great piece of wit, critique and satire on Obama's folly
Enlightened Cynic - 07/28/2010 - 16:03 
Big HA. How long will people tout Obama's Harvard Education as if that made him a combination of Isaac Newton and an African Shaman, when the wilileaks shows he's the biggest clown, dunce, stooge on the planet. A "war of necessity," that is in reality a war of choice that we are losing. What is increasingly clear is that not only is America (like its key ally Israel) "all talk and no cattle" when it comes to it's vaunted military prowess, but it's moral duplicity has been put on full display by wilileaks, as Fred Reed states below:
"But tell me: why is a GI’s life, mine or anyone else’s, worth more than the life of an Afghan child of three? Especially if you pretend to be a Christian, tell me. (I love this part. Military Christians are wonderfully funny frauds.)
A pretty good rule of thumb is that the attacking army is in the wrong, which would have made a Vietnamese kid’s life worth more than mine. I'll buy that, though I'm happy it didn't work out that way. But the attacking countries always believe that Their Boys are sacred." 
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Mattis.shtml
More from Fred:
Does General Dworkin-Mattis speak of manhood? Odd, since his military is being badly outfought by the unmanly Afghans that are fun to kill. By the Pentagon’s figures the US military outnumbers the resistance several to one. The US has complete control of the air, enjoying F16s, helicopter gun-ships, transport choppers, and Predator drones, as well as armor, body armor, night-vision gear, heavy weaponry, medevac, hospitals, good food, and PXs. The Afghans have only AKs, RPGs, C4, and balls. Yet they are winning, or at least holding their own. How glorous.
Man for man, weapon for weapon, the Taliban are clearly superior. They take far heavier casualties, but keep on fighting. Their politics are not mine, but they are formidable on the ground. If I were General Dworkin, I’d change my name and go into hiding. Maybe he could wear a veil.
Perhaps the US should recognize that it has a second-rate military at phenomenal cost—an enormous, largely useless national codpiece. It is embarrassing. The Pentagon’s preferred enemies are lightly armed, poorly equipped peasants, which makes for a long war and thus hundreds of billions of dollars in juicy contracts for military industries. Yet the greatest military in history (ask it) gets run out of Southeast Asia, blown up and run out of Lebanon, shot down and run out of Somalia, with Afghanistan a disaster in progress and Iraq claimed as an American victory rather than Shiite.Do the aircraft carriers intimidate North Korea? No. Iran? No. China? No. For this, a trilliaon dollars a year?
The reasons for the mediocrity are clear enough. First, the Pentagon has become a contracting agency for buying gorgeous and elaborate arms of little relevance to the wars the US fights. (If the Martians attack, we’ll be ready.)
Second, the US is no longer a nation of hardy country boys who grow up shooting and loading hay bales into pick-ups for spare change. (For the uninitiated, hay bales are heavy.) I often see headlines such as “More than two-thirds of Texas schoolchildren flunked the state's physical fitness test this year…” If Texas has gone all soft and rubbery, you can forget about Massassachusetts. The American pool of hardy, manipulable kids without too much schoolin' isn't what it was. The lack of troops of course pushes the Pentagon toward more pricey gadgetry and greater imbalance."
Now, it is regarded as treasonous to question that Our Boys are the best trained, best armed, toughest troops in the world, and I’ll probably get punched out in bars for pointing out the awful truth. Let’s imagine an experiment. We take Killing-is-Fun General Mattis-Abzug, and a thousand GIs, and a thousand Taliban, and let them fight it out in any patch of wretched barren mountains of your choosing. On equal terms. What you think? Same weapons..
Good idea, General? You eat what they eat, wear what they wear, They have no medical care, and neither do you. If they get lung-shot and die the hard way, you do too. It will come down to guts and motivation.
  a.. Login or register to post comments
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
PEASEHEAD - 07/29/2010 - 05:43 
The United States contains roughly six percent of the world's population. There is no way that six percent of the world's population can lord it over the rest of humanity, or even just that portion which calls itself Muslim through military means, no matter how much money it invests in technology and firepower, or how tough, disciplined, well trained, and well equipped its troops are. After centuries of defeats, enemies of the West have finally learned not to mass their fighters for open battle where they would be massacred by Western stand-off weapons. All that they need to do is to keep us, or at least our pricey, high-tech military in play until we run out of patience or cash, or more likely, being an empire, pick a fight with someone else somewhere else in the world, and move on.
  a.. Login or register to post comments
Cost / "Benefit" Analysis 101
Enlightened Cynic - 07/29/2010 - 10:01 
By any estimate based on public records scrubbed of "black op" budgets, the "super secret" cash set aside for US death squads, drug dealing, arms smuggling and the like, we have spent TRILLIONS, not billions, but TRILLIONS OVER THE PAST DECADES on "wars" and "counter-terrorism" and look at the benefit's we've inherited.
We live in a world where a former (if not present) CIA asset, bin Laden, has been more accurate in his predictions of the fall of the US Empire, US entanglement and folly than all of the "intelligence" analysts and private contractors like SAIC. $8 Billion in "brainpower" Ha, what a joke.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703
We couldn't defeat the Sunnis, until they realized they were boxed in by US, A.Q., and the Shia, they took our bribes allowing us to lie about the "surge" working when in fact the Sunni couldn't fight a 3-front war. Now that the bribe money has stopped flowing, Iraq is fracturing, but again, that was the intent all along, the US "spreading its democracy via creative destruction." The US employing divide and conquer tactics that have worked since the advent of colonialism. And for all of that "shock and awe" the winner of the Iraq War, as Prof. Cole wrote years ago, is Iran.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/07/21/iran
Michael Shueuer and others wrote long ago that bin Laden has better foreign policy wisdom than the mighty policy wonks of the US of A.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Scheuer
Pepe Escobar as also written brilliantly, and insightfully about US Imperialism as a failed venture, he perspective is summed up in this book review:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5265
"What is most compelling is the unpretentious manner in which Pepe Escobar sifts through the incredibly complex historically-rooted strands of Islamic history and political geography to clarify the implications of the historical fault-line cutting through Islam, that between Shiite and Sunni and all its manifold complexities. It makes starkly clear how Washington and the pro-war Pentagon hawks are playing with a fire that has the potential to ignite a conflagration not even the Pentagon’s Smart Bombs, Full Spectrum Dominance, Net-Centric warfare methods, its Revolution in Military Affairs, laser-guided bombs or deadly chemical weapons would be able to control. Iraq today should serve as ample warming, were anyone in Washington even dimly aware." 
Imperial Hubris has trumped all of the "intelligence analysis" costing us trillions with no return on the investment and no end in sight. One man in a cave wiser than the entire (public/private) US intelligence apparatus.
  a.. Login or register to post comments
Some food for thought
Enlightened Cynic - 07/29/2010 - 13:22 
Published on Thursday, July 29, 2010 by TomDispatch.com
The End of (Military) History? The US, Israel, and the Failure of the Western Way of War
by Andrew Bacevich
"Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/29-6
II. The "Liberal" media and wikileaks
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/pers-j29.shtml
"The corporate-controlled media’s attitude toward the release of the documents has been one of unconcealed hostility. From the beginning, it worked out a game plan with the Obama administration and the Pentagon on how the WikiLeaks story could be packaged and presented to the public in a manner that would have the least possible impact on the conduct of the war."
a. The New York Times and the Afghan documents
By Bill Van Auken
28 July 2010
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/time-j28.shtml
  a.. Login or register to post comments
= 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20100801/28c484b9/attachment-0001.html>