John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MICHAEL SCHEUER IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Now, Mr. President, With Respect, Cut the Crap and Get Out of Afghanistan”

“Mr. President you are surrounded by advisors who are morons, liars, money-grubbers, mineral-chasers, war-lovers, and democracy crusaders, as well as generals who cannot tell the difference between winning and losing”

 

There are some truths here, including, of course, the main point about the urgent need to just get out of Afghanistan.

But they are often poorly stated and, importantly, as I will explain, mixed and blurred with a lot of other matters. The author’s language, too, loses credibility and can distort meaning, although a remarkable number of Americans seem to believe otherwise, that such language reinforces truth.

Overall, the language is indicative of much of what the author has to say – again, getting beyond the one essential point about the need to leave Afghanistan – so much of it really being not much more than bellowing from a disillusioned imperial acolyte.

Exclamation points from the gut. But I have never been a reader or a writer who admires the use of exclamation points.

I do think attitudes in the use of language reflect what an essentially violent country America is, both abroad and at home. And that’s why others often cannot understand it, and why it cannot understand them.

After all, this author, by his own admission, spent many years of his life working towards a pointless goal in Afghanistan. It took him an awfully long time to realize anything about what he was doing (in an undoubtedly well-paying job). Such is the strength of preconceptions and religious mumbo-jumbo prejudices like “God Bless America” Patriotism.

It’s actually quite hard to understand America’s establishment on the subject of Afghanistan.

After all, America, especially in its rural areas, is packed with gun-toting, get-out-of-my-face types who hate most government and authority.

Well, that’s what the Taliban represent in their poor, hardscrabble country.

That’s all they’ve ever represented.

They are not concerned about the bureaucrats living in Kabul unless the bureaucrats interfere with them, as they have been doing incessantly under American prompting.

And they certainly aren’t concerned about the world at large, about geo-political matters, except to the extent, again, that any of it impinges on their society and way of life. Certainly, an invasion and occupation of 18 years would tend to do that.

If anyone should be able to understand the Taliban, Americans should.

But they don’t or they refuse to do so.

The entire war was a waste over misunderstanding and America’s emotional need for vengeance after 9/11. Americans never even bothered to understand 9/11, to investigate it, to get at its causes, and to identify its authors accurately. They just demanded vengeance and the satisfaction of seeing lots of things get blown up.

No one understands 9/11 to this day, but the chaotic war in Afghanistan heads towards twenty years of destruction and waste.

The war never had a legitimate cause. And the truth is that all of America’s reactions, viewed from a distance, represent a kind of massive chaotic black comedy or primitive ritualistic cleansing ceremony.

The Taliban never were terrorists in the sense that we understand the word. Yes, they are rude, backward, mountain-men types who don’t hesitate to use violence against enemies, but that is not what we mean when we use the word “terrorist.”

The Taliban had given bin Laden, a devout Muslim and a genuine hero in the fight against Soviet occupation, a refuge away from the Saudi Arabia establishment that hated him, an establishment totally in bed with America.

George Bush’s oil operations were assisted by Saudi Princes. Bush was actually never astute enough to start or run a serious business on his own, and the Saudis were always looking for ways to flatter and influence Americans from big-name families. Just as they gave rare gifts and donated to the Clintons.

That’s all. So, you start and maintain an 18-year war over that?

Just insanity, believing your own propaganda about the Taliban.

Truly, America has been the most inept imperial power since WWII, fighting many meaningless wars and achieving very little, except profits for the defense industry and relatively well-paid jobs for many young Americans who might otherwise have swept floors or been unemployed.

The final irony of it all is America’s adopting for its Israeli-inspired Neocon wars, wars designed only to attempt remaking much of the Middle East to the liking of America and Israel, the very methods of terror.

In Syria, in Libya, and elsewhere, young CIA recruits are supported in behaving like mythical jihadi types when all they really are is old-fashioned mercenaries without uniforms. They never battle against what genuine jihadis would battle against, which would be Israel and the corrupt Saudi Princes and American influence.

No, they fight, with terrorist methods, governments which have done a fairly decent job for the bulk of their people, governments such as those of Gaddafi or Assad, but who remain independent-minded and do not toe the American imperial policy line.

That position, not toeing the line, is simply not allowed. Better to kill a couple of million people, create tens of millions of refugees, and destroy whole societies, which is literally what America has done in the Middle East in cooperation with Israel. Always while bellowing about terrorists and tyrants.

Oh, there has been some genuine “international terror,” a relatively small amount, especially in Europe. It represents little more than efforts to get some revenge for what has been inflicted upon the Middle East in the bloody, bloody Neocon Wars. It would never have occurred otherwise. People don’t just kill and put their own lives at risk for no reason at all, as George Bush’s lamentably stupid words about terrorists being jealous assumed.

I find the author’s last words about American generals and cabals by them and their incompetence especially alarming. It has the tone of American militia types who eat freeze-dried rations and live at the bottoms of old missile silos in the American West. A bit deranged.

The problem isn’t generals, incompetent of not, the problem is the very existence of a gigantic military with no purpose other than enforcing empire. Belief that it represents anything else at all, such as legitimate defense and patriotic duty is the beginning of all problems and disillusion.

Remember always, the realities and effects of power, and of nearly absolute power in particular. And how else can you possibly describe the Pentagon and CIA and NSA and the Washington establishment?

We have close to absolute corruption on a massive scale.

 

FOOTNOTE CONCERNING ISRAEL AND ITS MANY WARS, INCLUDING THE NEOCON WARS – MATTERS QUITE APART FROM THE TALIBAN AND AFGHANISTAN ALTHOUGH IT ALL GETS JUMBLED TOGETHER IN PROPAGANDA ABOUT TERROR AND THE SUPPOSED NATURE OF ISLAM

 

Modern Israel represents something a little like a huge American corporate subdivision – a bit like Disney’s original project called Celebration, Florida – only one built with Biblical and Sunday School themes to justify putting it on another people’s land.

It has taken almost continuous war and violence to support the development, and there are few signs of that violence abating.

Its residents are mostly of European descent and have attitudes much different than those native to the region, an almost predictable source of unending strife.

In many respects, its face towards the rest of the Middle East, with its hundreds of millions of people, much resembles that of the fortress redoubts built by European Crusaders during the Middle Ages.