Sacking McChrystal: Testimony to a Lost War

Stephen Lendman

On August 10, 1997, in the New York Times Magazine, David K. Shipler headlined, "Robert McNamara and the Ghosts of Vietnam" saying:

Looking back, one of the key war architects admitted "how dangerous it is for political leaders to behave the way we did" about a war that shouldn't have been fought and couldn't be won.

In his 1995 book, "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam," former Defense Secretary McNamara wrote:

"....we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

In 1965, he knew the war was lost and said so, telling Lyndon Johnson: "I don't believe they're ever going to quit. And I don't see....that we have any....plan for victory - militarily or diplomatically," spoken as he began escalating dramatically, knowing the futility and criminality.

Johnson was also uneasy, telling his close friend, Senator Richard Russell, that he faced a Hobson's choice saying: "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," the former being impeachment if he quit, the latter certain defeat that destroyed him. After three heart attacks, he died a sick, broken man, four years after he left office, two days before Richard's Nixon's second inauguration, a man soon to face his own moment of truth, omitting what should have brought him down and his successors.

America's Longest War - As Unwinnable as Vietnam, Reshuffling the Deck Chairs to Delay It

McChrystal's out, Petraeus is in, New York Times writers Alissa Rubin and Dexter Filkins announced the switch June 23, headlining, "Petraeus Is Now Taking Control of a 'Tougher Fight," saying:

He's taking over to execut(e) the strategy (he engineered) with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal....directly responsible for its success or failure, risking the reputation he built in Iraq," not a winning surge, but by buying off Sunni tribal chiefs and key Baathists not to fight, a much tougher strategy in Afghanistan, the traditional graveyard of empires, defeating Alexander the Great, Genghis Kahn, the Brits and Soviets among others, America likely next, but will Petraeus be around when it happens.


Endless Occupation?

Sheldon Richman
Freedom Daily

So Gen. Stanley McChrystal is out and Gen. David Petraeus is back at the helm in Afghanistan. I don’t like hackneyed phrases, but if this isn’t rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, what is it?

America’s occupation of Afghanistan has no end in sight. The July 2011 date for the beginning of withdrawal is something that even President Obama doesn’t want to talk about. It is clearer than ever that the date was a crumb thrown to the American people so they wouldn’t grumble when Obama announced the troop buildup last year. As Petraeus told members of Congress this month, “It’s important that July 2011 be seen for what it is, the date when a process begins based on conditions, not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits.”

Obama presumably would like to get out — he can’t be thrilled about presiding over America’s longest war — but the cross-currents may leave him no choice but to tread water. The military wants to “win,” whatever that means, while the Right is ready to pounce on Obama as an appeaser of terrorists if he acknowledges the reality of this inglorious war. (Al-Qaeda has moved on.)

We call the operation in Afghanistan a “war,” but in fact U.S. forces are occupying the country in order to suppress any opposition to the corrupt and inept Karzai government that the United States helped put in power and has protected ever since. In the parlance of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, any enemy of President Hamid Karzai is an enemy of the United States, which is ridiculous. Afghans don’t like invaders, be they Britons or Russians or Americans. That they attack occupying forces and the governments those forces support means nothing more than that they want to rid their land of foreign troops. That doesn’t make them anti-American terrorists. It makes them Afghans. Let’s leave their country to them.


WAR CRIMES IN GAZA and the ZIONIST FIFTH COLUMN IN AMERICA

James Petras

WAR CRIMES IN GAZA and the ZIONIST FIFTH COLUMN IN AMERICA
FROM THE PREFACE

"The US Congress and White House are zionized occupied territory."

The Report published by the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, better known by the name of its head, as the “Goldstone Report” was a major breakthrough in three senses. In the first place the Report was the most systematic, detailed study of Israeli violations of international law in its wars against the Palestinian people. Secondly it caught the attention of the broadest sections of world opinion and ignited a firestorm of disapproval of Israel from almost all of the worlds’ leaders.

On the negative side the publication of the Report and the vehement rejection by all of the mainstream American Jewish Organizations, revealed their utterly craven disregard for human rights on the one hand and their absolute power and control over Washington’s policy toward the Middle East on the other. The US Congress voted by a margin of over ten to one to denounce the Report and instead support Israeli war crimes, as did the White House.


The Reality Of Zionism

Jonathan Azaziah

A refutation of Shelby Steele’s propaganda piece masquerading as a legitimate editorial.

1. World opinion is to be divided into two categories. The first category is the category of governments, and the second category is the category of citizens. In the framework of the first category, the overwhelming majority of governments have supported the Israeli massacre of the Freedom Flotilla, because the majority of governments are under the influence and/or subversion and/or control of the Zionist lobby. In that same framework, whatever government officials have offered a condemnation of the ‘attack,’ have not specified who exactly they’re condemning, and this, as aforementioned, is the result of the Zionist lobby. Again, in the same framework, the minute amount of government officials that have actually condemned Israel itself, their condemnations ring hollow, for they will not be backed up with action. In the framework of the second category, it is becoming increasingly evident, that populations of the world, Muslim and Jewish, Christian and Hindu, Black and White, Latino and Asian, lower-class and middle class, have lost their patience with the constant tyrannical, genocidal, and quite frankly, insane behavior of the illegal occupational entity known as Israel. The people are tired of forking over their tax dollars to a state that murders, steals, occupies, rapes, tortures, imprisons for no reason, and now, pirates, when their money could go to their failing social and economic crises. The people are tired of another people, just like them, being unjustly treated in a fashion worse than animals, for 62 years. The people are weary of their governments who continue to lend their irrational, unwavering support to this criminal fraud of a nation. The people, finally, seem to understand the severity of the crimes against the Palestinians, and it seems, they finally want an end to it. When world opinion isn’t divided into these two diametrically opposed categories, then that phrase, is simply a generality being used to mislead on behalf of Israel and its cohorts in America and Britain.


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