To Spite Our Faces

Time magazine’s new cover girl certainly spawned a piranha swarm of controversy.  Lamentably, the outrage Time‘s Aug. 9 issue inspired has served to further mask the extent to which Obama-era war propaganda has eclipsed even the Orwellian efforts of the Bush/Cheney regime, and how that propaganda has buried the uncomfortable truth about our global military crusades.   

Certainly, the image and the story that accompanied it were as atrocious in a fundamental sense as the circumstances that led to the subject’s mutilation.  Equally awful was managing editor Richard Stengel’s jack-asinine excuse for the content of the issue. "I felt that the image is a window into the reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us," Stengel wrote.  

If Stengel wanted to show us what is really happening, why didn’t he run images of Taliban leaders receiving bribe money that came from the United States.  Why not show pictures of President Hamid Karzai’s political machine stealing the most recent election?  Why not show the heroin crop our military has been ordered not to destroy?  Let’s see the innocent women and children that we have maimed and killed in the course of pursuing a war that weakens to our nation’s security and is counter to our best interests.   

Let’s see the American G.I.s whose faces have been mutilated in the pursuit of waging that woebegone war.  Pismire Stengel argues it was okay for American kids to see the mutilated Afghan girl on the cover of Time because "children are so used to seeing violence in the media."  But the kind of violence children see in our media is mostly the cartoonish variety they see in video games and vapid action films and other popular American entertainments.  Our access-poisoned media seldom show us real violence, the kind our soldiers see and smell and feel and hear on a daily basis.  Any video we see of fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq is so sanitized it looks no more gory than footage from the 1960s ABC television series Combat!

That’s not to say the caricatured violence in our media amusements doesn’t reflect a "civilization" that is every bit as barbarian as the Islamic cultures that counterfeit moral authorities like Pat Robertson glibly condemn. 

Yes, Virginia, women get mutilated in America too, and battered and raped and murdered and so on.  So do children, and gay people, and members of ethnic minorities, and heck, heterosexual white males, for that matter.  Much of this violence comes at the hands of spouses and relatives, as happened with the Time cover girl.  Other violent episodes in America are the doing of armed gangs and militias, as is the case in Afghanistan and other parts of the heathen world we have invaded.  A considerable portion of organized violence in America is carried out by fanatic religious groups, as also occurs in places like Afghanistan, although the violent religious fanatics in America tend to be Christian, something I’m sure the Stengels of this world find far more palatable than the kind of violence performed by people who aren’t as right with the Baby Jesus as Pat Robertson would like them to be.     

America’s double standard vis-à-vis violence isn’t its only prominent hypocrisy.  Irony, the bulwark of human sanity that suffered an untimely demise during the Bush/Cheney regimen, would take enormous satisfaction in objections made by the Pentagon’s sub-ministry of truth to the Taliban’s use of propaganda.  "King David" Petraeus, newly installed commander in Afghanistan and no stranger to the use of deception, has directed his propaganda team to "fight the information war aggressively."  Rear Adm. Greg Smith, a career bull feather merchant (aka public affairs officer) and Petraeus’ top dog of information warfare, says, "This isn’t about positive or negative messaging. This is really about reality."

Here’s a taste of what reality means to Greg.  Whenever a bunch of Afghan civilians get killed we say we’re changing the rules of engagement to emphasize "the logic at the heart of the COIN doctrine."  When Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar circulates a new "code of conduct" aimed at reducing the number of non-combatant casualties, it’s a "PR stunt."   

The only "logic" at the heart of the COIN doctrine, by the way, is that you can never win, but you can never lose as long as you stay, so you can never leave.  The logic at the heart of U.S. propaganda in its theaters of war is that none of the locals will buy American malarkey because they can see with their own eyes how full of bilge the likes of Rear Adm. Greg Smith are.  We’re the ones who are occupying their country, not the Taliban.  Regardless of whether we are causing more combat deaths among non-combatants, we are causing a handsome share of them, and darn near zero combat deaths of any kind would occur if we weren’t there for the Taliban to do combat with. That there’s any question at all in the hearts and minds of Afghans as to whether we’re better or worse than the Taliban means Afghan hearts and minds are closed to us forever. 

And of course there is no logic to the notion that we have to stay in Afghanistan or women will get their noses cut off when they’re getting their noses cut off while we’re still there.  But therein lies the beauty of Obama-era neo-Orwellian war propaganda.  It doesn’t have to make sense, because it isn’t aimed at Afghans or Pakistanis or Iraqis or anyone in touch with ground zero truth. American war propaganda is aimed at the citizens of the United States, whose minds have been so thoroughly bleached that they’ll believe darn near anything they’re told.    

In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother inquisitor O’Brien demanded that Winston Smith tell him he was holding up three fingers even though he was only holding up two.  In Obama’s 2010, the likes of Greg Smith feed us pile upon pile of undiluted horse manure, tell us it’s chocolate ice cream and expect us say "Yum!"  

So it is that so many Americans still believe that our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have something to do with 9/11, or that we’re accomplishing some sort of good in the world by blowing it and its inhabitants to smithereens.

The ubiquitous pro-war message that pervades every nook and cranny of our information environment manages to mask a measurable, irrefutable truth that would otherwise be as plain as you know what: The most destructive and morally insolvent society on earth is not the Axis of Evil or the evil doers or even the remnants of the Evil Empire.  It is the nation that once had hopes of becoming a "kinder, gentler nation" and that "shining city on the hill."

Originally posted at Antiwar.com.

Code of Military Justice

Gen. Stan McChrystal, United States Army, will leave active service with four stars instead of three because of a special waiver bestowed on him by President Barack Obama. One is supposed to hold four-star rank for three years before one can retire at that pay grade, something McChrystal obviously didn’t do, but Obama made nice and let him walk away with a full set of collar candy anyway. The extra star makes a staunch bit of difference in McChrystal’s retirement pay. He’ll start at $181,416 per year versus the measly $160,068 he would have received otherwise. But both of those amounts are chump change compared to what Mr. McChrystal is likely to knock down in his Beltway banditry career.

Noted counterinsurgency illusionist John A. Nagl, a retired Army light colonel and a Beltway bandit himself, says that “forcing” McChrystal to retire with three stars “would have sent a signal that he was out of favor.” Colleagues, according to the New York Times, say that because McChrystal kept his fourth star he’s not “radioactive,” so he can expect a bright future “as a well-paid outside consultant to the Pentagon or a government intelligence agency.” Don’t be shocked to see McChrystal named CEO of whatever Blackwater winds up calling itself next.

Retired three-star Beltway bandit Jack Keane, a key node in the war mafia’s AIPAC-neocon-Pentagon-Congress-White House connections, says of his protégé McChrystal, “Stan will land on both feet, make no mistake about that.”

Lynndie England, the marginally self-aware former private in the United States Army Reserve, was one of the few bad apples who took the fall for the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. She received no pension at all after she left the Army with a dishonorable discharge, and she couldn’t get back her civilian job as a chicken-plucker after she was released from military prison.

It took two trials by courts-martial to convict England. The judge in the first court-martial, Army Col. James Pohl, declared a mistrial because he doubted whether England was mentally competent enough to understand what a raw plea deal her incompetent military defense lawyers had wheedled her into. Pohl also questioned whether she possessed sufficient cognizance to discern right from wrong. The five officers on the second jury clearly had a more flexible conscience about making junior enlisted personnel the patsies for policies established at the four-star level and above; they sentenced her to a three-year term.

Torture was a key aspect of what “King David” Petraeus recently referred to as McChrystal’s “exceptional leadership” as commander of the infamous Joint Special Operations Command. As head of JSOC, McChrystal was directly responsible for the interrogation camp in Iraq known as NAMA, an acronym that stood for “Nasty A** Military Area.” The Camp NAMA motto was “No Blood, No Foul,” a slogan that reflected the interrogators’ philosophy that “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” As one Pentagon official explained, “there were no rules there.” The Red Cross was never allowed into NAMA on order of Gen. McChrystal, who visited the place a number of times and who had a really darn good idea what was going on there.

Journalist Seymour Hersh called the JSOC part of an “executive assassination ring” that McChrystal ran under the direct control of Dick Cheney, who as vice president had no constitutional or legal authority in the military chain of command. Gen. Stan and his Howling Commandos, along with CIA hooligans, Blackwater yahoos-of-fortune, and other patriotic psychopaths, rubbed out God only knows how many “suspected” terrorists who were identified by intelligence beaten or bribed out of nefarious sources. There’s no telling how many innocent civilians were slaughtered in the process of these vigilante-style shoot-em-ups.

McChrystal has more blood on his hands than Macbeth and his wife put together, and he is as mendacious as he is murderous. His involvement in the cover-up of the Gardez Massacre, in which U.S. Special Forces destroyed evidence of collateral damage by digging their bullets out of the corpses of civilians, made his whitewash of the Pat Tillman fratricide affair seem venial by comparison, a petty sin that might be absolved with a fistful of Hail Marys.

By rights, McChrystal should be the gaunt, smirking face of American war atrocities, but he is far, far too special to be cast as a villain. Born of military nobility – his father was a two-star general – McChrystal learned early in life how to work his decoder ring and give the secret handshake. West Point Cadet McChrystal made his reputation as a bad boy, but he always knew just how far he could push things and still land on the safety network his father’s connections provided him.

It’s little wonder that he got away with MacArthur-magnitude insubordination when he used his 60 Minutes infomercial and other media tricks to corner Obama into going along with escalating the Bananastans* fiasco. And the Rolling Stone escapade was a stroke of passive-aggressive virtuosity. A diamond-studded parachute, it bailed McChrystal out of responsibility for the disaster he had created.

McChrystal is as made a guy as a guy can get made in the American war mafia. His bollixing of the Bananastans conflict has become the crown jewel of the Pentarchy’s** Long War strategy by making Obama’s July 2011 withdrawal date vanish like a wallet on a Chicago sidewalk. Will he ever go to trial for war crimes? Forget about it. A whole bunch of people in a lot of high places knew what McChrystal was up to and tacitly if not actively approved of it, and if he ever faces criminal charges, he’ll sing like Frank Sinatra.

Lynndie England grew up in a trailer park. In grade school she was diagnosed with severe learning disabilities. How she got into the Army Reserve is anyone’s guess. She doesn’t have friends in high places, or anywhere else for that matter. Upon her release from prison, she returned home with her son (by fellow Abu Ghraib felon Charles Graner) to West Virginia, where, according to a March 2009 Associated Press story, she “spends most of her days confined to her home.” She says she suffers from depression and anxiety, a claim one finds easy enough to believe.

She gets by on welfare and help from her parents. In 2007 she landed a spot on her local recreation board, but it was a non-paying position. Though she’s sent out hundreds of resumés, she can’t find a paying job. When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, the other employees threatened to quit.

People point and whisper, “That’s her.” England relates that one stranger sent her a note that suggested her mother should “shoot herself for raising somebody like me, and that I should kill my baby and kill myself, or give up my child for adoption, because the way I was raised they didn’t want him to turn into some evil monster, too.”

She has tried changing her appearance by dying her hair and wearing sunglasses and ball caps. “But it’s my face that’s always recognized,” says England, who never once directly or indirectly or on purpose or by accident caused the death of a single human being.

* The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our banana republics in Central Asia.

** The Pentarchy is the cabal of oligarchs who support and promote the Pentagon’s Long War agenda..

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.  

The Stepmother of Invention

It’s a sign of the New American times that even when we know we don’t have cogent grounds to continue our woebegone wars, we can’t invent compelling reasons to end them.

In September 2009, President Obama caved to Pentagon demands to send more troops to the Bananastans* even though nobody in the Department of Defense could tell him what they’d do with the extra troops. This was before Obama fired Gen. David McKiernan as Bananastan commander to make way for Gen. Stan McChrystal, who was fired to make way for Gen. David Petraeus, whom Obama should have fired the second he took office, along with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, and the rest of the Bush administration Pentarchy**.

Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana is the latest voice in Congress to express doubt about what is now inescapably Obama’s war. Once a supporter of our imperial pratfall in the Bananastans, Lugar now says, “The lack of clarity in Afghanistan does not end with the president’s timetable,” and he thinks that our involvement there is “proceeding without a clear definition of success.” Politeness Man couldn’t have put it more civilly.

We don’t have coherent war aims. The “realistic and achievable” objectives that Obama’s national security “Chess Masters” established in their March 2009 Bananastans policy paper revolved around a “core goal” to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.”

CIA director Leon Panetta recently reaffirmed that the number of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is “50 to 100. Maybe less.” Maybe none. Michael E. Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, says there are “somewhat more than 300” al-Qaeda characters hiding in Pakistan, which means there are somewhat fewer than 400 there for a total of less than 500 of them in the Bananastans. Since experts like Leiter say the vast majority of al-Qaedeers are in the Bananastans that puts their strength worldwide at comfortably under 1,000. A 2005 report by the Century Foundation said that al-Qaeda never had more than “several hundred” formal members. (The Century Foundation was talking about the real al-Qaeda, not the copyright violators in Iraq. The “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” hooligans are like a college that calls itself “The Harvard of Northwest Indiana.”)

Whatever al-Qaeda’s exact number is, it’s a safe bet that it has fewer card-carrying members than the Ku Klux Klan or NAMBLA. Leiter says we’ve made “incredible successes” against al-Qaeda, and that the group “is weaker today than it has been at any time since 2001.” But, but, but, but, but, Leiter quickly adds, “Weaker does not mean harmless!” Senior Pentagon bull-feather merchant Mullen does Leiter one better: he’s worried about the “depth of synergies” between al-Qaeda and other insurgent groups, including (ominous chord) the Taliban! Where do we find such admirals? The next thing you know, Mullen will be asking for a defense budget hike to help close the “depth-of-synergies gap.”

And as I’ve often noted, even if there’s only one al-Qaeda member, the only safe haven he needs to plan and direct terrorist operations against Americans is a pocket big enough to hold his smart phone. For the U.S. military to deny al-Qaeda sanctuary, it would have to occupy every nook and cranny of the earth from the bottom of the Marianas Trench to the peak of Mount Everest, something that couldn’t occur even in neocon prodigy Freddie Kagan’s wettest dream ever.

The only genuine security threats the Bananastans present to the U.S. are the nukes in Pakistan and the heroin in Afghanistan, but none of our national security tank-thinkers give a pig’s wings about either of those things. If we ever decide to so something about those threats, though, the Air Force and Navy could bomb both of them back to the molecular level in less time than it takes the Baltimore Orioles to lose a baseball game.

Other “realistic and achievable” goals set out by the white paper included establishing legitimate governments and effective security forces in both Bananastans. We’ll cure cancer before either of those things will happen. Our decision to stand by election-robber President Hamid Karzai ensures that Afghanistan will never have a legitimate government. Afghan security forces are corrupt, incompetent, and infiltrated by insurgents, and estimates that they may be able to operate without training wheels by2014 were arrived at with the aid of hallucinogens.

As for Pakistan, it’s even more of a security state than America. Pakistan’s army chief,Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, just strong-manned his prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, into extending his term for another three years. This makes Kayani even more powerful in his country than Petraeus is in ours.

By August 2009, shortly after McChrystal took command in the Bananastans, the war intelligentsia had stopped wasting oxygen on arguments that our circus in Central Asia had anything to do with our national security. Counterinsurgency shaman David Kilcullen, an adviser to both Petraeus and McChrystal, baldly admitted that counterterrorism was “not at the top of my list” of reasons we “need to persist” in the Bananastans. Among his top justifications, according to journalist Anne Gearan, were that the United States and NATO have promised protection to the Afghan people, that the future of the NATO military alliance could hinge on perseverance in Afghanistan, and that if Afghanistan crumbles, nuclear-armed Pakistan would probably follow.

Harrumph! Kilcullen needs the sharp edge of a stainless-steel hanky administered to the upside of his noggin. One of McChrystal’s last acts as top banana in Bananastan was to delay his much heralded Kandahar offensive because the locals told him they didn’t want his protection. As for Pakistan crumbling, we can rest assured that Gen. Kayani won’t allow that to happen, even if he has to stay in power six, 10, 15 years – whatever it takes!

That leaves us continuing to gush national blood and treasure over the Khyber cliffs to preserve a military alliance that hasn’t had a gnat’s whisker’s worth of relevance in two decades. This is the same NATO that presently provides troops to ISAF, the acronym for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan that, according to U.S. troops, actually stands for “I Suck At Fighting.” None of that keeps NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen from being “optimistic” about the Afghanistan project, though, and he says NATO will “not leave Afghanistan prematurely.” So I guess we have to stay too. If they stay and we leave, they might call our troops a bunch of sissies, and we can’t have that now, can we?

Last week the House of Representatives told the Senate they’d vote yes to $60 billion for more war in the Bananastans if the Senate voted yes to $20 billion for school districts and grants to low-income college students and security along our border with Mexico. The Senate sneered and told the House no to investing $20 billion into items of genuine national security and yes to throwing $60 billion at a war that is wholly contrary to our best interests. What a shameful indicator of America’s priorities.

Even worse, though, is the spine of the antiwar argument that insists we should withdraw from the Bananastans conflict because we can no longer support it economically. We became a global hegemon by dominating the rest of the world militarily. For us to continue to fight wars based on whether or not we can afford them is madness. It is difficult to imagine a need for us to fight any sustained armed conflict, much less one against an enemy that doesn’t have a navy or an air force or even a real army to speak of. If we ever encounter a war we truly need to fight, we can afford to fight it whatever the cost, but an old green penny is too much to pay for a war that isn’t necessary.

And it is clearer than ever that the most wrong thing Barack Obama has ever done, and likely will ever do, is to call our Chinese fire drill in the Bananastans a “war of necessity.”

We must stop putting up with the militaristic nonsense our elected officials continue to perpetrate. Here’s hoping the WikiLeaks bombshell helps blast us out of the ovine torpor we’ve been seduced into by the war mongrels who President Dwight Eisenhowerwarned us would take over our country if we didn’t keep them on a short leash.

* The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our banana republics in Central Asia.

** The Pentarchy is the Pentagon oligarchy that promotes the Long War agenda.


Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

Pavlov's Dogs of War Revisited

Super Dave Petraeus, newly installed as top banana in the Bananastans*, is practicing the exploding-cigar kind of diplomacy Dick Cheney and his cabin boys perfected during the Li’l Bush regime.

Following policies outlined by the neoconservative cabal in their September 2000 manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Dick and the Destroyers’ negotiations with Iran amounted to a bad practical joke. Making an unacceptable demand as a precondition to talks – namely that Iran give up its UN-guaranteed right to refine uranium for peaceful purposes – ensured that talks would never take place. When the Iranians refused to knuckle under to an outrageous demand, Team Cheney could say they tried diplomacy and it didn’t work, and continue to press for war.

Nothing has changed under the Obama administration; we’re still demanding that Iran give up its right to refine reactor-grade uranium, and it still refuses to cave in to what amounts to bullying on our part. And perennial AIPAC Shemps** John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are still running around telling the world how we’ll go to war with Iran if we have to and that the U.S. Congress “has Israel’s back” in return for Israel maintaining the oldest established permanent floating campaign-finance racket in American history. So our animosity toward Iran is theoretically based on the threat Iran poses to Israel, even though, despite what the Ministry of Truth Network would have you believe, Iran can’t do anything to Israel militarily.

It’s little wonder then that one of King David’s first acts as praetorian governor of Central Asia ensured that peace talks don’t take place among the concerned local parties. As “senior officials” have told the New York Times, the Teflon General has introduced the idea of “blacklisting” the Pakistani warlord group known as the Haqqani network by having it declared to be another Club Terror affiliate. That would disrupt the peace coalition Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai is trying to form.

In one version of that coalition, Haqqani network leader Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani would become Afghanistan’s prime minister. Given his connections, Haqqani could coax the Afghan Taliban into a power sharing agreement with Karzai’s government, and because of Haqqani’s close ties to Pakistan’s government, he could broker terms with Afghanistan’s neighboring archrival as well.

And good golly, we wouldn’t want that. If all those Bananastanis decide not to fight each other, then the only excuse we’ll have for staying there is that we don’t want to leave, and we don’t want to admit to something like that out loud. We like to at least cover our aggression with a fig leaf. Mom and the kids are watching, for heaven’s sake.

By now, everyone with a brain larger than a tea bag knows our so-called war on terrorism isn’t about terror. The only effect our war is having on terrorism is to enhance it by creating more terrorists. But even bona fide brainiacs are hard pressed to say what our war on terrorism is about.

Everything we’re doing now is as it has been since young Mr. Bush took office: in strict accordance with Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the neoconservative manifesto that said since we no longer had a peer military competitor we had better invade and occupy the entire world before somebody came along who could stop us (like the Vulcans, maybe).

Occupying Iraq was step one. It had little to do with Saddam Hussein; he was just a convenient excuse. The neocons weren’t concerned about weapons of mass destruction, and they didn’t give a gnat’s meow about terrorism. Iraq had enormous geostrategic importance, though. Located in the middle of the Gulf region and featuring easily navigable terrain, it offered a perfect bully base of operations from which U.S. land and air power could molest the rest of the Muslim world until kingdom come or the planet ran out of oil, whichever came first.

Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno floated his recent suggestion that the UN establish a long-term peacekeeping mission in Iraq with the prime neocon directive in mind. The present disarray of Iraq’s government provides a choice opportunity to slip into place a new UN occupation mandate that extends beyond the December 2011 deadline of the present status of forces agreement. And, naturally, the troops who fill the new UN mandate would be the same as the troops who filled the old UN mandate, i.e., U.S. troops. (Pretty clever, huh? Maybe we should start calling Odierno the Sly Ox.)

Now that Teflon General Petraeus is directly in charge of ensuring peace doesn’t break out in the Bananastans, Obama’s promise to limit our military involvement there is as bogus as a George Washington penny. The reasons the pentagogues*** keep feeding us for staying the course in the Bananastans are equally specious, but their true ambitions become clear when we again consider geostrategic bases of operations.

Iraq provides expanding lines of operations, interior lines of communications, and all the other operational artistry that goes with a central base of operations. The Bananastans provide us with exterior position. Exterior bases of operation provide converging lines of operations, and when we combine the land bases in Bananastan and Iraq with our maritime posture in the Indian Ocean, we have more than sufficient geostrategic leverage on Iran to squeeze it like the boil on a wicked witch’s forehead.

Now little old me figured this out, and all I have are myself and an iMac and two dogs for research assistants. The neocons have global networks of tank thinkeries staffed with multi-degreed career warmongers, so they’ve surely stumbled upon similar revelations, and this is without question the general scheme of operations they’re presently pursuing.

What I can’t figure out is how Pavlov’s dogs of war have managed to convince so many people that the Iranians are worth expending American national effort against. Their defense budget is less than 1 percent of ours. Their conventional air, sea, and land forces are strictly defensive in nature, unable to project power significantly beyond Iran’s borders and shores. Their ballistic missiles are unlikely to work properly in real conditions. Even if one of their missiles did work, it wouldn’t be worth shooting at anybody because the Iranians don’t have a payload worth wasting an expensive missile on. They don’t have nuclear weapons, and despite the dedicated efforts of Israeli-sympathizers in the CIA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and elsewhere to convince you otherwise, the Iranians don’t have a nuclear weapons program either.

One might attempt to build a blanket rationale for the American military to run rampant in Central and Southwest Asia by playing the oil card, but that’s bogus too. Neither Iran nor any other oil country wants to shut down the flow of oil from the Gulf. The people who have oil need to sell it as badly as the people who need oil want to buy it.

So what explains America’s seemingly unalterable aggression? History shows that some people will fight over whatever there is to fight over, and that if there’s nothing to fight over they’ll fight over nothing. People with this type of personality disorder typically get themselves put in charge of things like school boards and civic leagues, where they can be annoying to their hearts’ content but are relatively harmless.

What I haven’t puzzled out is how enlightened people allow the same sorts of lunatics to control the policies of mighty nations and wreak havoc on entire civilizations. Can someone please reassure me that leadership entails more than having a malignant ambition to destroy the universe and sufficient charisma to get away with it?

* The “Bananastans” are Pakistan and Afghanistan, our banana republics in Central Asia.

** A “Shemp” is a second-string stooge.

*** A “pentagogue” is a member of the “Pentarchy,” the militaristic oligarchy that aligns U.S. foreign and domestic policy with the priorities of the Pentagon. Also known as “Pavlov’s Dogs of War,” “war mongrels,” “the warmongery,” “Big War,” and “War, Inc.”

Catch the rest @ Antiwar.com.