U.S. In No-Win Situations

By Sam Hamod

12/05/07 "ICH " --- - No doubt about it, the U.S. is in a no-win situation in Afghanistan, much like the Russians of a few decades back.

It's too bad America didn't learn its lesson from the Russians in Afghanistan and the French in Viet Nam, but we didn't; we went ahead as if we were the "good guys" who wore the white hats and could not lose because God was on our side. As it turns out, God is not on our side, and we have gone into a country that is not accustomed to allowing others, or their puppets as is Karzai, to take over their country. The Afghans know the mountains of their country, they know all the terrain, the caves, the resources and they have the will-power to withstand the winters and the invasion forces of any and all enemies, as the Russians, the British and now the Americans have found out.

For Bush to think that Musharraf could contain Al Qaida, destroy the Taliban and save Afghanistan for Karzai and America shows how naive he and his buddies in Washington and New York are--they all share the blame, from the White House to the Senate, to the Congress to the NY Times. They all believed the same folly about Afghanistan that they were later fed about Iraq, that we would be welcomed as "saviors," by the people and that they would dance in the streets and support us. As I have long stated in my hundreds of articles, it would not, and did not, happen, and will not happen in any of these countries we are sticking our nose into thinking that it will not be bloodied, whether it is these two countries or Somalia, the Phillipines or Pakistan (if we are foolish to send more troops in there, as we have done on some short sorties within the past year).

Not only have we lost our military personnel, we have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, poisoned more with DUI (depleted uranium which has a half-life of over a million years) including our own service personnel, and children in Iraq and Afghanistan for years to come. These people will never forgive us for these sins, and they should not--as we would not forgive them if they came here and did this to us.

It is now apparent that Bush has wanted to take over Iraq, just as I pointed out years ago in Counterpunch.com and in Informationclaringhouse.info, he wanted it to be "his own little country,"; now, his new treaty, that we shall remain in Iraq forever, makes clear that that was always his plan, not Iraqi "freedom" or Iraqi "democracy," or even taking out Saddam (based on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Powell and Lieberman lies about WMDs and more).

Now, we have lost thousands of our people to death, hundreds of thousands to wounds, both physical and psychological,and hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of Iraqis dead and or wounded--for naught except the extension of power that may last on a temporary basis, but not over a decade at the most because in the end, the Iraqis and whatever groups of allies they will find, will finally attack so long that we will have to leave, as did the Mongols, the Turks, the British and finally us. The same is true in Afghanistan. But to make the problem worse for us in Afghanistan, the billions of dollars that will be made with the largest opium poppy crop in decades will help the Taliban and the warlords buy weapons on the international market that will make them even more powerful enemies who will use these weapons against our regime in Afghanistan and perhaps even in the U.S. So, our wars have not paid, but they may come back to haunt us even more than any of our planners have foreseen.

Add to this, that our economy has been hammered by the expenses of these two wars, wars without ends in sight, and with no return of anything except enemies and sorrows, and you can see how finally some day, the American people will wake up to the destruction we have wrought on others and on ourselves, because every dollar spent on destroying Iraq and Afghanistan is money that could have been used to rebuild the infrastructure of America, to help the poor, the homeless, the elderly and to create jobs for our people because the money would have been recirculation in our economy--instead, it is going to waste in the deserts of Iraq or into the pockets of Halliburton and Bechtel and Blackwater or their cohorts, or into the mountains of Afghanistan, or into the bribes that have not been effective in bringing these wars to a close.

No, it is a no-win situation that is bad and can only get worse, a vicious cycle of destruction, sorrow and defeat brought about by men who know nothing of war and who knew nothing of war, but decided they knew how to run a war based on lies that they were sure would make them go down in history as great men. How foolish they were, how foolish they and their allies in both political parties, from Bush to Lieberman, to Hillary Clinton to Nancy Pelosi and the whole lot--all have betrayed the people of America, these are all people who do not value the lives of the American troops or the Iraqi or Afghani people, and who do not, and did not, value the future of our children and their own grandchildren because of what they have done to help the war and what some have not done to stop these wars and the funding of them.

Tis sad, very sad, but now, we must all pay the piper, even those who were against these wars. This reminds me of the good German, Japanese and Iraqi people who were against Hitler, Tojo and Saddam, who did what they could, but who could not stop the war machines because those in power had all the weapons and the armies to do as they wished and told the people, just as our leaders have told us, to "Go to Hell."

So, now we are in hell, and who knows if and when we'll ever get out of it.

Sam Hamod may be reached at samhamod@sbcglobal

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18834.htm