Stephen Lendman

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot, The New York Times headlining:

"Kennedy is Dead, Victim of Assassin; Suspect, Arab Immigrant, Arraigned; Johnson Appoints Panel on Violence"

Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged assassin, convicted, and serving a life sentence at (no pun intended) Pleasant Valley State Prison, CA, despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

In his October 17, 2008 article "The Assassinations of the 1960s as 'Deep Events,' " Peter Dale Scott discussed the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, saying:

"The more that I look at these deep events comparatively, ranging over the past five decades, the more similarities I see between them, and the more I understand them in the light of each other."

With respect to both Kennedys and King, official accounts obscured the events, suppressed key facts, enough to question the guilt of the alleged suspects, concealing the real culprits and why men of this stature were assassinated - what Scott called "some continuing and hostile force within our society..."

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Matthew Nasuti

A wounded U.S. soldier receives first aid inside a bunker in Bargematal,
Afghanistan, on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009. (Photo: Oleg Popov / Reuters)

[Part 1] "American soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen face the worst of two worlds. First, they continue to be supplied with cheap and substandard equipment (which has become a Pentagon tradition), while military contractors and war profiteers linked to Administration officials become rich. Second, when they are injured, their courage and actions are not recognized. Their injuries are many times not treated or acknowledged, and they are abandoned by the country they risked everything to protect. It is a shameful spectacle."

In Afghanistan, the light at the end of the tunnel is an exploding Taliban IED. The Pentagon has been given nine years to win its war and it has failed to do so. Last week the American public was given a status report by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who told Time Magazine that he is “pretty confident” that in six months the U.S. military will have made “sufficient progress” in the war.

This vague and hardly inspiring characterization (in which the Secretary commits to nothing) sets the stage for December 2010, at which time the military will cherry-pick positive news, as it minimalizes the bad news. The resulting concoction will be trumpeted as “progress.”

In order to continue to prosecute its lackluster war efforts and to deflect criticism regarding the competence of the military’s general officer corps, the Pentagon long ago realized that casualty rates had to be kept low. As they did not remain low, the statistics were adjusted. The procedure is simple. The Pentagon does not count 95% of the injured soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen as casualties. “Fudging the numbers” was adopted as the solution. All that matters is that Congress continues to fund the Pentagon’s wars.

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William Dalrymple

As Washington and London struggle to prop up a puppet government over which Hamid Karzai has no control, they risk repeating the blood-soaked 19th-century history of Britain’s imperial defeat.

In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain, Reverend G R Gleig, wrote a memoir about the First Anglo-Afghan War, of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, "a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has Britain acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated."

It is difficult to imagine the current military adventure in Afghanistan ending quite as badly as the First Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that slowly descended into what is arguably the greatest military humiliation ever suffered by the west in the Middle East: an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world utterly routed and destroyed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of £15m (well over £1bn in modern currency) and more than 40,000 lives. But nearly ten years on from Nato's invasion of Afghanistan, there are increasing signs that Britain's fourth war in the country could end with as few political gains as the first three and, like them, terminate in an embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos and quite possibly ruled by the same government that the war was launched to overthrow.

Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being swept away by General Stanley McChrystal's surge, are instead regrouping, ready for the final act in the history of Hamid Karzai's western-installed puppet government.

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David Ray Griffin

I wish to thank Tod Fletcher and Elizabeth Woodworth for considerable help with this essay.

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be "Obama's Vietnam."1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the "lessons of Vietnam"? The US government learned one: If you're going to fight unpopular wars, don't have a draft hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.

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Anne McClintock

In the Gulf, the forever spill has become the forever war. A calamity of untold magnitude is unfolding and, alongside it, a strange militarization has emerged, as the language for managing the crisis becomes the language of war.

War-talk is firing from the mouths of local officials, TV pundits, the Coast Guard and journalists. Campaigning frantically to protect Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal urges the TV cameras:

“We need to see that this is a war….a war to save Louisiana…a war to protect our way of life.”

Billy Nungesser, indefatigable President of the Plaquemines Parish, implores anyone who will listen:

“We will fight this war….We will persevere to win this war.”

For Ragin Cajun, Democratic strategist, James Carville:

“This is literally a war... this is an invasion…We need to hear someone say ‘We’ll fight them on the beaches….”

Retired Gen. Russell Honore, who oversaw the Katrina debacle, insists:

“We need to act like this is World War 3. Treat this like it’s an invasion...equal to what we decided about terrorists. We’ve got to find the oil and kill it.”

Find the oil and kill it? This is truly strange talk, this talk of war and killing oil. Even President Obama tried to fire up the nation by invoking 9/11, couching the spill as an invasion, a siege, an attack by terrorists. The militarization of the disaster has become the invisible norm, so much so that it is hard to see how misplaced and dangerous the analogy to war actually is.

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