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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 8/19/10

Maintaining the empire

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Message John Grant

We are a wealthy, profligate nation running scared. Instead of self-examination, we turn to military solutions and to leaders like General Petraeus who can make us believe in their fantasies, such as the current one that, if we had known then what we know now, we could have won in Vietnam. This is simply preposterous.

General Petraeus' meteoric career is now so wrapped up in "success" for the counter-insurgency program in Afghanistan that he has no choice but to do what generals do keep the war going to avoid failure and, for him, an ignoble retirement.

Only the antiwar left and elements of the libertarian right have the temerity to say this stuff out loud.

The antiwar left is like the mythic Greek Cassandra, to whom Apollo gave the gift of prophecy until she spurned his advances, whereupon he cursed her such that no one would ever believe her or give her credence. In some representations, she goes mad. In Aeschylus' play Agamemnon, she warns of the destruction of Troy, but no one listens and Troy is destroyed.

President Obama wants to have it both ways: He's an imperial war president who doesn't want to play that role. So he stays low while Petraeus drives a wedge into his stated plans for withdrawal and telegraphs to the nation to brace for more imperial war.

And so empire is maintained and the nation goes further down the tubes.

For the original of this article, go to:

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/175

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I'm a 72-year-old American who served in Vietnam as a naive 19-year-old. From that moment on, I've been studying and re-thinking what US counter-insurgency war means. I live outside of Philadelphia, where I'm a writer, photographer and political (more...)
 

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