"Blustering, Inhuman, Cruel and Ignorant"

Metrics of Monstrosity: Free Falling in Afghanistan by Chris Floyd

"The Grand Guignol in Afghanistan plays on, growing ever more absurd and macabre. A farcical election that makes the recent balloting in Iran -- the subject of such stern denunciation at the imperial court in Washington -- look like an exercise of the strictest civic probity. A "counterinsurgency" doctrine that churns out insurgents like an assembly line, manufacturing discontent with mass murders of civilians, and armed support of vicious warlords and corrupt officials. Influential voices on influential platforms calling for the establishment of an extermination program that killed up to 40,000 innocent people the last time it was tried. A skulking, scheming general hoping to parlay two disastrous wars into a run for the presidency. A failed "surge" about to be re-"surged" with thousands of more troops and billions upon billions of more public dollars poured into the pockets of contractors, weapons dealers -- and vicious warlords and corrupt officials. A weak and feckless president, who -- just like the cool, good-looking progressive played by Robert Redford in "The Candidate" -- obviously had no program or principle beyond getting elected, and is plunging headlong into a quagmire created by his despised predecessor, using the same war team, the same policies, and the same shifting, bogus "justifications" for continuing -- and widening and deepening -- a conflict so ruinous and pointless that even some of the Empire's most gung-ho cheerleaders are getting the vapors about it.

By any reckoning of reason, morality -- or even practicality -- it is a monstrous, evil folly. And yet it goes on and on, worsening by the year, by the month -- and with every major player in the ghoulish game declaring that it will keep going on, for years and years, if not decades. And despite the war's increasing unpopularity both in the United States and Britain, there is evidently nothing or no one that will stop it -- as long as the militarists hold to their long-running, highly successful tactic of not instigating a draft, and instead fighting their wars with overstetched, stop-lossed volunteers drawn from the poor (a burgeoning pool, thanks to the bipartisan continuity of the Bush-Obama oligarchy protection policies) -- and with a vast horde of out-of-control mercenaries and third-world indentured servants slaving away to keep "war-fighters" enjoying all the comforts of home. It seems more and more apparent that the majority of Americans are willing, if not always happy, to let the War Machine devour the national treasury, kill thousands of innocent people, destabilize the world and create generations of enemies for the United States -- as long as they or their children are not forced to fight the wars themselves."

Next April american forces will have been in Afghanistan longer than the military was in Vietnam.