Well dearest motherfuckers, I had published my doubts, but it appears that Old Man Biden is prepared to finally end our twenty year clusterfuck in Afghanistan by the end of summer after all. Well, sort of. Like any American peace deal, this one comes with a few bullet hole shaped asterisks. While "Combat" troops are set to fuck off by the end of August, the US still intends to keep a sizable contingent of heavily armed Americans at its 36 acre Branch Davidian style compound in Kabul along with Satan knows how many CIA agents. Biden is also maintaining colossal fleets in the Persian Gulf to keep up America's air war on peasant goat farmers with so called over-the-horizon capability.
So peace may be a strong word for a weak gesture, but it's still more than I had hoped for from a century long chickenhawk like Joe. And despite the incessant sob stories coming out of the mainstream media, who will have you and anyone unfortunate enough to listen believe that imperial conquest is the key to feminism in savage brown countries, there appears to finally be something of a bipartisan consensus that Afghanistan has been a gigantic waste of time and resources. Which frankly begs the question, what the fuck are we still doing in Iraq?
Out of the two flagship wars on terror, Iraq was always the more obvious mistake. At least Afghanistan had actually hosted the fuckers responsible for 9/11, even if they were more than willing to hand them over before we started shooting. The Iraq War had been precipitated on such obvious lies that I was able to expose them on my PC at 15 in between lesbian porno binges. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam fucking hated al-Qaeda more than we did. And yet we're still there. Biden can call them advisors all he wants but some 2,500 troops are still in Babylon, ready to die for some hopped up neocon conspiracy to control the world's oil supply.
There are currently two predominant excuses for our continued presence in hell and if taken together they are almost comically oxymoronic. Americans must occupy Iraqi soil to finish off what's left of ISIS and contain the apparently Iranian backed Shiite militias who whooped their ass into submission. It was dangerous extremists like Kataib Hezbollah who helped the evil Iranians crush the Islamic State after the American trained quislings in the Iraqi Army literally turned tail and ran for the hills. What's left of ISIS is hanging on by a thread and America is engaged in a heated tit for tat bombing campaign with the only people capable of finishing them off. Mind you that neither one of these "threats" to Walmart and apple pie would even fucking exist if it wasn't for the forty years of incessant warfare made possible by US tax dollars.
Most people suffer beneath the hefty delusion that America's current campaign in Iraq began in 2003, but the reality is it really began in 1980 when the dovish Jimmy Carter gave then ally Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Iran and it never really stopped from there. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 for a number of reasons, the biggest one being that Saddam fucking wanted to. America supported and funded this insane crusade for greater Babylon because the Iranians had done the unforgivable and went and had a popular revolution against one of our bloodthirsty puppets. But America wasn't content to simply fuel Saddam's conquest. We secretly and often illegally armed both sides of the Iran-Iraq War in a cynical attempt to weaken both nations. The end result was an 8 year death match of Byzantine-esque proportions. There was trench warfare, tank battles, human wave attacks, and chemical warfare. By the time the shit show was finished over 500,000 people lay dead and America had lost interest in keeping our old buddy Saddam around anymore.
The first Persian Gulf War was essentially a trap. During the failed Iraqi conquest of Iran, Bagdad's alleged allies in Kuwait had begun siphoning off oil from a hotly contested border region. The cash strapped Iraqis, who had never really recognized Kuwait's independence from their territory to begin with, took the Bush Sr. regime at their word when they repeatedly expressed little interest in the outcome of such a conflict, and launched another invasion. Only this time the Americans changed changed their tune the moment Saddam crossed the border. After thwarting several peace attempts from the understandably confused Iraqi strongman, America launched one of the most disproportionately heinous military campaigns in modern history. As Jean Baudrillard famously observed, it could hardly even be described as a war. It was more like a CNN infomercial for Boeing with war crimes.
After 40 days and 177 million pounds of munitions, the modern metropolitan state of Iraq had been reduced to a pre-industrial hellhole. We bombed literally anything that moved and quite a few things that didn't; hospitals, schools, power plants, oil fields, chemical weapons facilities, nuclear centrifuges, highways of retreating troops, highways of retreating civilians... We obliterated a civilian bunker, killing 1,500, mostly women and children. We demolished the nation's power grid and sewage system, leaving their population to rot in a flood of their own filth. Over 200,000 people died as a result of the war alone, 60% of them were children. The news media celebrated the massacre like the Fourth of July, oohing and aweing over the advanced technology that went into destroying a nation. During their brief occupation of Kuwait, Iraqi soldiers had discovered a memo from Kuwaiti intelligence revealing a conspiracy by Kuwait and the United States to goad Iraq into an invasion in order to cut the nation down to a size that the two parties could split and fit in their wallets.
But the Persian Gulf War didn't end in 1991. It continued without mercy through out the Clinton years with a crippling embargo that's been described quite accurately by resigning UN officials as genocidal. Anywhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million Iraqi civilians died from starvation and medical neglect, all with the intention of torturing the populace into overthrowing a dictator we had armed and empowered for years. When revolts did finally come from Shiites and Kurds, America left them to be slaughtered after promising our support. When asked if all this carnage was worth it, Secretary of State Madeline Albright shrugged. Every time Clinton was caught porking another intern, he dropped a few more bombs on the defenseless country to distract the pyromaniacs at CNN. The road to a second Iraq war was paved by Democrats in the form of a bill that essentially declared war on what was left of the crippled fiefdom of Saddam Hussein. By the time Bush Jr. showed up, the gun was already loaded. He just had to wait until September for his excuse to pull the trigger.
After the easily preventable attacks on 9/11, everyone was too pissed and stupid to care who we invaded. After putting on a half-hearted show in Afghanistan, Dubya quickly lost interest in catching Bin Laden and shifted gears to finishing off Saddam. The results were catastrophic for pretty much everybody but Iran who came to Iraq's rescue after the fruit of the surge ripened into ISIS and this is what our troops remain to fight; an Axis of Resistance to the horrors made possible by decades of American meddling. America likes to talk big on democracy in far flung places. Yet even Iraq's own American cobbled democracy voted unanimously in parliament to kick us out of their country in 2020. Even the people we put in charge have clearly had enough of our bullshit, so why don't we cut the name games and just get the fuck out.
I for one say we just let the militias have Iraq. They've done a better job governing it than we ever did. The truth is America doesn't give a flying fuck about democracy. We never bothered promoting it in the liberated monarchy of Kuwait for Allah's sake, and even if we did, that still wouldn't make it right for Iraq. The current government in Bagdad is as corrupt as its ever been because the Iraqi people didn't choose it. Just like Saddam, it was forced down their throats by certain enlightened white people convinced that the Westphalian nation state is the solution for savages everywhere. This system isn't indigenous to the Gulf. The militias that formed in the vacuum of its repeated failures are. In many ways they resemble the armed nomadic tribes who ruled these deserts long before we fucked them up. The last thing America needs to do is go to war with them. They might be the best hope that god forsaken place has left.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack; songs that influenced this post
* Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode
* War Pigs by Black Sabbath
* Brando by Lucy Dacus
* Run for the Hills by Iron Maiden
* Gigantic by the Pixies
* Mountain Song by Jane's Addiction
* Rocket by Smashing Pumpkins
* Sex Bomb by Flipper
* Its No Good by Depeche Mode
It wasn't exclusively about the oil, the Excited States of Murder & Great Mitten had to make an example of Iraq and Libya for having the nerve to switch from receiving US dollars to EU euros as payment for their oil not entirely unlike Haiti has had to pay a price for throwing the oppressive Frogs out over two hundred years ago.
ReplyDelete“Iraq was not about ordinary chemical or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The ‘weapon of mass destruction’ was the threat that others would follow Iraq and shift to euros out of dollars, creating mass destruction of the United States’ hegemonic economic role in the world.”
— William Engdahl
The "crime" Iraq and Libya were made examples of, is also the "crime" Venezuela is punished for.
The bottom line's magnificent upward mobility the Lockheed Martins and General Dynamics enjoy from Murder Inc. wreaking havoc should also be entertained.
"When imperialists say an issue is “complicated” what they really mean is that a very simple matter has been covered over by a lot of complicated spin and propaganda narratives."
— Caitlin Johnstone
Actually, I think Nicky has mentioned the issues you cite before.
DeleteIt is a bit complex, but you are certainly correct that it is much simpler than the MSM makes out. The basic principle is that anything or anyone that threatens American hegemony becomes the Satan Incarnate du jour.
In a nation like the USA where praying to a most mysterious Cod is more effective than attempting to get response from an elected representative or senator who is almost completely dominated by the corporate-financial-military complex, any hopes for real change towards a workable sensible democracy is such a fanciful impossibility that the progress towards a massive destruction of most of civilization has become inevitable.
ReplyDeleteJan, you may very well be correct, although I would like to not think so. Apparently our minds' abilities to create weapons of mass destruction far greatly exceed their abilities to create effective rules and protocols for limiting and restraining their use.
DeleteFor a long time, I read your comments on this blog, and simply wrote you off as a pessimist and negative thinker. Perhaps though, you are correct, and it is simply not possible for Homo Sapiens to survive with the characteristics of our behavior and knowledge being in the state they are in.
If there were any obvious openings to be an optimist I would most certainly leap aboard. I was born in 1926 and became an addict of science fiction in the late 1930's When SF in Astounding SF was written by engineers and scientists but never expected to see real space flight. but what really drove all the science was financed by weaponry with very little improvement in real intellect in those idiots whose only values were based on insane conquest of political power and no thought about the vital natural balances that permitted us to exist on the planet. There has been no improvement on that score and once AI is evolved to take charge of a digitally controlled planet, humanity will be so outclassed that humanity will cease to have any real influence on anything. Whether that is good or bad, I really cannot say.
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DeleteI wrote this about 40 years ago in the hopes someone might care. I was more optimistic in those days.
Requiscat
There will come a day long years from now
When the sandy desert wind will whistle to itself.
No footprints dotting lines across the dunes.
All memories of Man put on the shelf.
No more the candy wrappers dance along the road
Nor empty beer cans glisten in the night
To softly clink and hoot in gusty breezes.
Cardboard boxes banished from all sight.
Brick will fracture, crumble back to clay,
Their trellises of steel will rust away.
No more apartments stacked like packages
In some mad marketing array.
Concrete roads will crack, becoming rocks.
Funguses and moss will fill the gaps.
Mice and birds scurry past the pole
Where an ancient traffic sign still slaps.
Tall trees erect their magic structure,
Sink sucking mouths to kiss the earth deep down.
Spread green eyes to meet the morning sun.
Seas of dandelions flood downtown.
Small reservoirs of elephants, big cats,
Re-infect the forests with their grace,
Forage in and out through columned aisles
While branches make cathedrals out of lace.
Ocean-wise the seagulls dip and rise
Like soaring eyebrows off in search of eyes.
The seas are full of carnivals of whales.
No hooks nor nets nor harpoons terrorize.
No oil that blackens seabirds' wings
To bury pleading eyes in gummy straw.
Blue water glints and flaps against the sun.
Gone, hulls that dive and slide and yaw.
Here and there an old reactor core,
Silent, lightless, tasteless, without smell
Inflames the skin of Earth with sterile death
Like splinters risen straight from central Hell.
The canisters that roll beneath the sea
Crack and split to spill their glowing gifts.
Dead blotches on soft muds and sands
Which slowly kills. Relentlessly it drifts.
These are the monuments to Man,
The zenith that he's left behind.
When Stonehenge and the pyramids are dust,
Small creatures will they maim and kill and blind.
The ship of Earth has heeled and slowly rights.
The disaster that was Man has passed away.
The tapestry of life reweaves itself.
Celestial Spring has come and it is May.
Predators still make their deadly hunts.
It's one on one by tooth and claw and wing.
Each creature kills by inborn skills.
Murder has become a home made thing.
No more millions die at one man's stroke
To make cosmetics, or, perhaps, a joke.
Forests do not fall for gossip's sake.
Life is blessed by human Ragnarok.
The strangest thing is that Man's demise
Was done by Man with no assist.
As if he knew the blight he was.
It's certain that he won't be missed.
There is a current article at https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/28/apocalypse/ which indicates I am not completely out of order.
I like it. It reminds me of a more hopeful Ozymandias. I'm not quite as grim as you in outlook. I still think mankind can exist in harmony with nature but a lot of us will probably die before we do.
Delete"is more effective than attempting to get response from an elected representative or senator who is almost completely dominated by the corporate-financial-military complex"
DeleteThis personally hurts, when I think about all the times I wrote and called my Representative and Senators with personal messages begging them to see the sane course on foreign policy, only to receive back what was, for the most part, a form letter saying "I will keep your views in mind."
The key to a true and effective democratic government lies in the qualities of a fully aware and fundamentally intelligent citizenry with the power to use that grasp of reality to elect representatives to form a government responsive to fundamental needs. The last presidential election wherein over 70 million voters voted for the most obscenely incompetent and fundamentally vicious candidate is a powerful signal that the citizenry is so totally under the influence of commercial gangsters that democracy is no longer a realistic possibility. It was always under attack from the beginning of its inception but the digital world is the final blow that has severed that hair that supported the sword of Damocles.
ReplyDeleteThere is something about the current rapid rush of civilization to destroy itself that tempts me to mentally step outside of reality and guffaw at the raw nasty stupidity of those presumably in control puffing themselves as Gods supreme contribution to all living creatures which, of course makes God into a perfect idiot. I am somehow reminded of the Pogo Possum comic strip where perhaps a genius chicken might aspire to become the CEO of a fast food fried chicken empire only to discover it is on the menu.
ReplyDelete