With the American media as master of ceremonies, pundits and politicians—all partners in the neocon-neoliberal joint venture in Afghanistan—are barking mad over the images coming out of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, and the reality these optics portend.

Naturally, media “reporting” from Afghanistan is nothing but an unremitting sentimental gush, aimed at creating a state of heightened emotions.

“The children; the children; the translators; the translators. Americans held hostage behind enemy lines. ‘Teach the Taliban a lesson, Corn Pop,’” demanded a “macho” personality at Fox News. The same litany runs on a continuous loop.

Forbes reporters dissolved into puddles of tears at the sight of U.S. Air Force pilots bringing in plane loads of young, strong, military-aged men, unfreighted by women and children.

On August 20, about 5,700 people had been flown out of Kabul. Only 169 were American. “Make no mistake,” slobbered Forbes, “lifting six times more people than an aircraft is designed to seat is a heroic achievement of logistics, skill and sheer grit.”

I see a medal of commendation in the future of the Empire’s Pilot, who commandeered a U.S. Air Force C-17 to airlift 800 Afghani passengers from Kabul to Qatar.

War: The Health Of The State —And The Statists

So, who exactly are those “trapped” Americans living in Afghanistan?

What are they doing in such inhospitable climes, in a country most of whose inhabitants hated the American presence? And what is their business in Afghanistan? The incurious moron media have never asked.

My guess is that U.S. citizens in Afghanistan have hitherto lived within Army-erected green zones, paid for by American taxpayers.

My guess is that these Americans are mostly military contractors, an extension of the military-industrial-complex—also the ultimate state, make-work scheme.

A likely breakdown of our “Americans in Afghanistan” comes via Danger Zone Jobs, “which tracks more than 300 companies with overseas contracting jobs in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.”

Most “jobs” for Americans in a place like Afghanistan revolve around the military, “the two primary sources of jobs [being] with private contractors supporting the military and companies who subcontract to various international relief and development efforts.” In other words, the NGO racket.

By Danger Zone Jobs’ accounting, “Approximately 29,389 DoD contractors supported operations in Afghanistan during the 1st quarter of 2019.” There you have it. To paraphrase Randolph Bourne, war is the health of the State and the statists.

Still, you are not a good American unless you fret about Afghani translators (who, in turn, complain on-camera endlessly, and as loudly as CNN’s Dana Bash, about American dereliction).

Realpolitik: What Modest Foreign Policy Looks Like

Similarly, you are not a good pack animal unless you worry about “the Uyghurs, the Uyghurs. China is oppressing the Uyghurs. Our values, our values.”

Uyghurs are also China’s biggest headache, now that America is no longer mired in Afghanistan. What the dummies on the idiot’s lantern fail to tell you—although analysts at The Economist do—“Uyghurs count among thousands of foreign jihadists active in Afghanistan, mostly enlisted in Taliban ranks.”

So, as the skittish media hounds and politicians, stateside, gnash teeth and beat on breast over Afghanistan, less hysterical countries, abutting Afghanistan, are acting calmly in their national interest, to ensure that Jihad and heroin don’t spill over their borders.

Unlike Lara Kissinger Logan of Fox News, who “thinks” America could have won a war that other superpowers have lost—the Chinese and the Iranians are hip to what just happened. This was “probably one of the best conceived and planned guerrilla campaigns ever,” says Mike Martin, a former British army officer in Helmand province, now at King’s College London. “The Taliban went into every district and flipped all the local militias by doing deals along tribal lines.”

In negotiations with the Taliban, Beijing has thus realistically demanded that Afghanistan not become “a base for ethnic Uyghur separatists.” For their part, “Taliban leaders have pledged to leave Chinese interests in Afghanistan alone and not to harbor any anti-China extremist groups.”

Like Beijing, Tehran, too, is busying itself with realpolitik. While Iran is “delighted to see the Great Satan, America, abandon its bases next door,” it worries about cheap heroin flooding in from Afghanistan, as well as the persecution of the tiny Shia minority of Afghanistan.

There is another matter that vexes the Shia of Iran, but is of no concern to the State Department, which generally “doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola” (The phrase is, “Doesn’t know sh-t from Shinola.”)

Don’t Know Shiite From Shinola

“Shia Muslims … view their own Islamic revolution as a modernizing movement,” explains the Economist. After all, “Women can study, work and hold office in Iran, so long as they veil.”

Consequently, Iranians “look askance at the Taliban’s hidebound Sunni fanaticism.” Shia Iran worries about the Sunni insanity, and rightly so.

That’s yet another aspect of foreign policy that good Americans are not permitted to question. For merely asking, “When last did Iran commit terrorism against the US?,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was attacked viciously by rival personality Mark Levin. Carlson, however, was on the money. As I chronicled in 2017: “Iranians killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975 -2015.”

What do you know? When compared with Sunni Islam (for example, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism), a faction of Islam with whose practitioners the West feels much more simpatico—Shia Islam (Iran’s poison of choice) is more enlightened. Yet America and Israel side with Saudi Arabia, the epitome of Sunni insanity. Go figure.

After Afghanistan, we can all agree that American foreign policy is an angels-and-demons Disney production—starring the prototypical evil dictators killing their noble people, until the US rides to the rescue—and that the producers at Foggy Bottom don’t have the foggiest idea what they are doing.

WATCH:

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 26
Unz Review, August 26
CNSNews.com  August 30
The New American, August 27
Quarterly Review, August 29

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This war was first and foremost an injustice—a massive moral failure. For how else does one describe the willful, unprovoked, ruinous attack on a Third World country, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war, and which had no navy or air force, and was no threat to American national security? ~ilana

McCain demonstrated his inability to tell Shiite from Shinola ~ilana

Michael Ware, the best war-time correspondent broadcasting from Baghdad, tried to remind his CNN colleagues covering the Petraeus-Crocker extravaganza that “the war is not a campaign event.” During this valiant but vain effort, Ware said: “I have come almost directly from the war…some people are living this thing.”

Ware, who is seldom caught off-guard by events in Iraq, and who’d been briefly held captive by al Qaida, is still a world away from the reality of American politics. The made-for-television event, down to the crush of reporters and canned performances from the presidential candidates, dismayed the tough reporter in that it was “more about the campaigns than about the war itself.”

Against this background, both amusing and macabre, Gen. David H. Petraeus put on a bravura performance. Petraeus, acting as a military man-cum-unelected policy maker, defended a pie-in-the-sky policy over and above an unviable military mission. It was something to behold how Petraeus managed to pull back from the unconstitutional abyss each time he was about to enunciate the policy he was manifestly promoting, if not crafting.

Petraeus’ Princeton smarts, however, did little to pierce his bafflegab about equations, this or the other co-efficient, “battlefield geometry,” and “non-linear” political progress.” All in all, we were informed that security in Iraq was “significantly better,” but still “fragile and reversible.” The surge had worked, but not well enough to allow a significant drawdown of troops. The troops would stay, at least until the changing of the guard in November.

Bush’s boy in Baghdad has given the president the backing for a policy the American people have repudiated. It is well-known that Bush regularly bypasses Petraeus’ superiors, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen. They both understand “the broad view of our national security needs … and the risks posed by stretching the force too thin,” countered Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. To preclude that “broad view,” Bush has habitually sidestepped the chain of command. Chain of command, separation of powers, limited and enumerated powers—winking at those fundamentals is all in a day’s work for W.

But boy, did Clinton corner Ryan Crocker! Hillary exposed the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and his bosses for the extraconstitutional sham they’re running. It transpires that the government of Iraq intends to ask the Iraqi parliament to vote on whether to provide the legal authority for U.S. troops to continue to conduct operations in Iraq. Why in bloody blue blazes, Clinton demanded to know, was this administration not asking the United States Congress to vote on that too?

Had Obama so deftly exposed the way in which the administration is shunting aside the American people and their (lame) representatives, you’d never have heard the end of it. In response, Crocker predictably consigned to the executive branch decisions to be rightfully made by “We the People.” The Decider decides under the Bush administration’s constitutional scheme. The “advise-and-consent procedure” would not be required in this matter, ma’am, quipped Crocker in Orwellian: “We intend to negotiate this as an executive agreement.”

Indeed, Petraeus had already informed the president he’d like to “wait until the summer” before deciding whether to reduce troops or not. Bush has fixed the policy around Petraeus. Both have already shaken hands over the “agreement.”

Most Americans are unaware that there’s anything wrong with the way our executive dictatorship does business on our behalf. What they know about the powers of the people, the separation of powers, and the imperative of checks and balances is positively dangerous—almost as dangerous as McCain’s knowledge of al-Qaida.

When cementing his open-ended commitment to usher in Utopia in Iraq—”a peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state that poses no threat to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists”—McCain also demonstrated his inability to tell Shiite from Shinola:

McCain: There are numerous threats to security in Iraq and the future of Iraq. Do you still view Al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?

Petraeus: It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was say 15 months ago.

McCain: Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites overall?

Al-Qaida international and Al-Qaida Iraq are Sunni. Call them Wahhabis, Salafis, Takfiris, if you like, but not Shiites!

From then on it was all downhill. Clinton complained that “the longer we stay in Iraq, the more we divert resources not only from Afghanistan, but other international challenges, as well.” The lady would prefer to deficit spend elsewhere in the world; pursue a more Democratic “mission” or “war.”

Obama hedged his words, offering meekly that the US invasion was a “massive strategic blunder.” Is that all it was?

This war was first and foremost an injustice—a massive moral failure. For how else does one describe the willful, unprovoked, ruinous attack on a Third World country, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war, and which had no navy or air force, and was no threat to American national security?

©2008 By Ilana Mercer
WorldNetDaily.com
April 11

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And the Iraqi dispossessed – at least 200,000 people have been forced to flee Fallujah – are destined to be forgotten footnotes in this fight ~ilana

“One of the first things you learn in the military,” my father was saying during the monthly call I put through to his home in South Africa, “is to stay mum about impending operations. Soldiers’ lives depend on it.” Dad, who had served in the Israeli Defense Force reserves, was baffled by the American military’s habit of planning and conducting missions on television, in full view of all and sundry, including the enemy.

Indeed, “Operation Phantom Fury” (the American euphemism for flattening Fallujah, soon to be replaced by the Orwellian “Operation New Dawn”) saw our embedded journalists surface like rattlesnakes after winter hibernation. Well in advance of the Fallujah offensive, these embeds could be heard broadcasting details about the number of troops (about 10,000), their method of training, their approximate position, their plan of attack, the specific challenges confronting them, as well as the tactics they would employ, once in the city, as they navigated through “a warren of dangerous alleyways.”

In anticipation of the assault, Fox News posted on its Web site a photo essay entitled “Preparing for Fallujah Assault.” Interested jihadists around the world could view photographs of U.S. soldiers sealing off roads to the city, checking ammunition, and preparing their vehicles “at a base outside Fallujah.” A CNN photomontage treated mujahedin spoiling to join the fight for the “City of Mosques,” as Fallujah is known, to pathos-drenched pictures of U.S. Marines as they primed for war, inscribing name, rank, and blood type (“zap number”) on body armor. When another network reported, unabashed, that the “Marines hope to surprise insurgents,” I finally switched to comedic news served straight up: Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show.

It certainly seemed peculiar for Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera to worry as he did that a deserting Iraqi captain would pose a security threat to the forces poised to “flush Fallujah.” The defector had nothing on Fox embed Greg Palkot. Or, to be more precise, on the military loose lips that whispered in his ear. As Palkot’s military informers told him, and he reported, our Marines and GIs would be equipped with gas masks and anti-tank missile tubes strapped to their packs. As if the soldiers were not vulnerable enough, one battalion commander (from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, I think he said he was) volunteered that many of his charges had never seen combat before.

The incessant bombardment of such sensitive information can’t but compromise American lives. This disregard for the safety of our soldiers, moreover, has obviously been graced with an imprimatur from on high. The top brass is determined to sell this war to the civilians. And who better to entrust with this mission than the ratings-craving (and craven) television networks. Behold the military-media complex. Or to be more accurate, the military-media-industrial-congressional-complex.

The task force of journalists I watched groveling before “Big Dog” Donald Rumsfeld, barking in agreement after every wisecrack, consisted of the same characters who went AWOL last year, failing to perform their elementary duty to question the administration’s case for invasion. What good little pack animals they are.

It remained for Kofi Annan, of all people, to pick up the American media’s slack. Annan, if you catch my drift, is not working with much. Even so, he still managed to raise some good questions about what is bound to become the Fallujah Fiasco. In a letter to Whitehall, the White House, and to the Baghdad bunker where Iyad Allawi is embedded, Annan anticipated some of the unfortunate effects flattening Fallujah would have on the January elections and on Iraq in general.

But for our media canines, escalating the violence in Iraq and further alienating the Sunni segment of the population were of no consequence. Eager to return to their vomit, as fools return to their folly, they were in no mood to be unnecessarily probative about Iraqi civilian casualties. And the Iraqi dispossessed – at least 200,000 people have been forced to flee Fallujah – are destined to be forgotten footnotes in this fight.

Fallujah may not have inspired the little dogs to conjure up such bon mots as “Breaking Baghdad,” “Decapitation,” and “Shock and Awe,” but Greg Palkot bared his teeth and growled up a storm at those Iraqis foolish enough to defend their own country, delivering reports festooned with promises to “whack ’em,” unleash “cans of whoop-butt” on them, and “send them to Allah.”

To paraphrase Tacitus, these things we misname empire; and where we make a wilderness, we call it a “New Dawn.”

©By ILANA MERCER
November 10, 2004
Antiwar.com

* Screen pic credit

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