[Peace-discuss] Flyer for Farmers' Market

[Carl G. Estabrook]

If there's no objection from members of AWARE, I'll distribute the appended as a flyer at the Farmers' Market this Saturday. --CGE

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Guest Commentary, C-U News-Gazette 7/22/12

WHY THE WARS AREN'T 'WINDING DOWN'

Last month President Obama celebrated his policy of murder in an obviously planted article in the New York Times. Of course the most important thing the federal government does is kill people, and the Obama administration has shown itself even more brutal and efficient at that than the Bush administration was. But both administrations have followed a generation-long US foreign policy, to the benefit of only a tiny economic elite in America - and to the detriment of most Americans and others.

Today the US government is threatening, invading, and occupying countries from Libya to Pakistan, and from Central Asia to Central Africa - a vast circle with a more than 2,000-mile radius, sometimes called the Greater Middle East: the US military calls it "Central Command." This region has the world's greatest concentration of oil and natural gas, and our government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars, month after month, to control it. Control and not just access to these energy resources is what our government demands. We in fact import very little oil from the Mideast - no more than we export from the US - but control of Mideast oil gives the US an unparalleled advantage over its oil-hungry rivals in Europe and Asia.

We're killing people in Asia and Africa because China and other countries need oil, and our government intends to control where they get it. Our government says that we are conducting these vastly expensive wars to stop terrorism and protect civilians - but we can see that, instead, we're killing civilians and creating terrorists. These wars are against the interests of the vast majority of Americans, as well as those of people in the rest of the world - they serve the interests only of those the Occupy Wall Street movement calls "the 1%."

This US war policy remains essentially the same whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in office. More than 1,300 Americans have died in Afghanistan since Obama took office, more than twice the number that died under George W. Bush. In addition, thousands of Afghans have been killed, and thousands of Afghans and Americans are living with horrible injuries. The corpses - including those of children - are piled high around the White House.

The government claims that the war in Iraq is over, and that the war in Afghanistan is 'winding down,' but neither is true. In traditional imperialist fashion - like Britain and France in the 19th century - the United States government is relying on  puppet governments to do its bidding. Iraq - with the world's second largest oil reserves - will have the world's largest embassy (ours, of course) and a collection of US officials and mercenaries the size of an army division; Afghanistan ("Pipelinistan," as it is called) has "agreed to host US troops" at least until 2024!

The Obama administration’s innovation in the US war in the Mideast and Africa is to add assassinations - by drone or death squad. The US "Special Operations Command" is now - amazingly - active in 120 countries, according to the Command's spokesman; President Obama has killed men, women, and children - including American citizens - with drone attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen - countries with which we are not at war (and some of which are supposed to be 'allies.') He is acting with no legal authority and in obvious violation of the Constitution.

Bush kidnapped people around the world and tortured them in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in pursuit of US foreign policy: Obama simply murders them.

[C. G. Estabrook (PhD in history, Harvard) is a retired visiting professor at UIUC who conducts the program "News from Neptune" on Urbana Public Television. He can be reached at <cge at shout.net>.]