The Scrivener's Diary

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It is Monday night, November 30, 2009, as this is being written, and President Obama has apparently committed to sending tens of thousands more troops to  Afghanistan. This is a  terribly flawed decision, and absolutely no good can come of it.

Instead of sending more troops, the United States should just bring all the troops home now from both Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is a huge difference between defeating a country in war and conquering a country. The US did not find it difficult to drive the Taliban out of state power with military action.

But conquering Afghanistan, imposing a new form of government on it from the outside is a different task.

As Michael Moore in his heartfelt open letter to President Obama says:

There’s a reason they don’t call Afghanistan the “Garden State” (though they probably should, seeing how the corrupt President Karzai, whom we back, has his brother in the heroin trade raising poppies). Afghanistan’s nickname is the “Graveyard of Empires.”

Graveyard Of Empires Indeed!.

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This is a rather extensive update of a piece I wrote and originally published in several places in December, 2006. It was updated in November, 2009

Most American politicians and many pundits now concede they were wrong to support Bush’s invasion of Iraq, stating that the administration lied to them about its justification. Politicians who voted to support the invasion, especially liberal politicians, say that the Bush administration lied to them about its reasons for this invasion. It is hard to believe this, especially in the case of bright, educated, and talented people like Hillary Clinton and others. The Bush administration’s phony excuses did not fool many ordinary American citizens, who did not have the same access to information as did the Clinton-style politicians and inside-the-beltway denizens.

When trying to justify launching this war, the Bush administration and its apologists gave reasons that included:

• Saddam’s supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction
• Saddam’s nose-thumbing UN weapons inspectors in the face of UN sanctions
• The undoubtedly brutal nature of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship
• The supposed desirability of creating an Arab democracy that would serve as a beacon in the Middle East, the latter a more “politically correct” and polite version of early 19th century meme of carrying “white man’s burden” and securing the “blessings of western civilization.”

But the truth is that none of these stated reasons were the real reasons for this war. These currently transparent excuses were really nothing more than a now-failed public relations ploy.

As demonstrated below, the American corporate rulers had planned this war a decade before the initiation of hostilities. This war planning had always been about control of energy resources and marketplaces, not democracy, not terrorism, not Islam.

Moreover, this war was not an aberration from American moral principles that supposedly guide its foreign policy. It was the natural outgrowth of a longstanding foreign policy, a strategy that stems back from the days of the Spanish-American war of 1898 and before.
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Update: Nov 9, 2009

This blog has been inactive for quite a long time, and this was my first post right after I had put in the wonderful WordPress software. I just went through reinstalling an update to this software to address security issues.

I will be posting more in the future here.

September 9th, 2006 by Alan

If you have been visiting, you may have noticed that the blog looks quite different. There is new software being used for this blog. I had cobbled together the previous blog, and it had gotten to be too cumbersome to maintain. Moreover, lots of spammers had joined up just to have another link. I will try to stay on top of that.

I hope to be adding back the old users bit by bit and restoring the old posts. Meanwhile, please understand that I reserve the right to remove any comments for any reason.

Regards,

Alan