VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: Venezuela gets another year or two of peace and independence. The new US president, Barak Obama today announces the deployment of 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
- Our US president has consigned the above number of US soldiers to the Afghan purgatory and will use the forthcoming NATO conference to urge Europe to add more of their own men to this festering cauldron of dishonour, death and corruption.
For us, those who have ever steadfastly opposed the Empire, every US or NATO soldier lost in the wastes of Central Asia is one less who one day will storm ashore at Lake Maricaibo. Or one day, too old to fight the Taliban, will become at home another policeman or jail guard.
US strategy in Afghanistan is suffering the same problem it had in Iraq. It is impossible to state the real reasons for this campaign: In this case the need to maintain a pathway into the former Soviet republics of Central Asia so as to win for our criminal elite access to their abundant stores of oil and natural gas. In Iraq the plan of the former administration of George W. Bush was to conquer for his friends in Texas the reserves of the second oil producer in the world -- and high-grade, light sweet crude it is too. But that whole insane project has now been foiled by the stout resistance mounted by hundreds of thousands of patriotic Iraqis and the clever diplomacy of Iran.
But now in order to execute this new imperial strategy the USA must also fight a new war in Pakistan, this nation now being attacked almost daily by US air power. A single glance at any map will show you how utterly useless is any aggressor's plan to win a clear road from Kazakhstan or Tadjikistan to the sea. The Russians do not want us there. The Afghans do not want us there. The Pakistanis do not want us there. And the terrain across this inhospitable land of dry mountains and valleys is the harshest of tactical challenges to any military. Yet nevertheless the masters of the USA remain completely and utterly dedicated to this losing strategy.
- In a very real sense the new freedom enjoyed by Latin America is being bought with Muslim blood ... but so it seems it must be.
One more empire, that of Wall Street and Texas Incorporated, will find its last resting place in the Afghan graveyard.
In the meantime the economic devastation and its congruent political corruption wrought by two generations of vain attempts at world dominion has rendered our nation's most populous state, California, unable to pay its bills. And this intractable problem is spreading now from one US locality to another. Kansas is now insolvent as well. And Massachusetts, Maryland and others are not far behind. The whole neo-liberal corporatist experiment has collapsed, leaving behind only the ashes of disaster. Yet still our misleaders must pretend they have still the power to alter to their liking by military force the politics of nations 8 000 kilometers removed from our borders.
All I can say is that the Bolivarians of Venezuela are fortunate in the pride, the criminal hubris of their enemy, and very, very lucky in their timing.
From the imperial capital
Chris Herz
chris.herz@vheadline.com
As a postscript I must ask: Where are the once vociferous nutters of the US right wing who formerly and regularly wrote their obscene and disparaging comments -- are you phony patriots asleep or what? I miss your silly and ignorant codswallop which convinced me that I was doing a faithful job of journalism. Are you now beginning to sense how thoroughly you have been diddled by your masters?
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