Damn, damn, damn. I did it again. I had an entire entry ready and then I accidently opened another page. I tried to hit ‘back’ and everything was gone. *groan* I do that way too much. Note to self: save often.
Anyway, I posted a link the other day to an article which describes the buildup of a longterm US military presence in Afghanistan. This is hardly surprising to anyone with eyes and ears. The whole of the war on terrorism is nothing but a pretext for expanding American power, influence, and dominance over the rest of the world. The machiavellian US Establishment finds Afghanistan a particularly tasty morsel for a number of reasons.
First and foremost are the immense reserves of fossil fuels including oil and vast supplies of natural gas. This would be an obvious boon to Bush’s owners who run the US oil and energy industries. Secondly, Central Asia has enormous strategic importance for the US war machine. Afghanistan is right in the middle of where the US would like to have a foothold. Afghanistan shares a tiny border with China who they would like to keep an eye on. It shares a border with Iran who the US would like to keep pressure on. Also an American presence in Afghanistan would create a nice expanding box around Russia with NATO pushing in from the west. Russia, I might add, has significant quantities of natural resources which American business would love to have control over. It’s an offer they can resist. The WTC attack was merely the perfect excuse. No nation would dare to openly criticize this move lest they then become accused of harboring ‘terrorists’ and end up becoming a target of this war. This is the modus operandi of the US. They used the same strategy during the Cold War in their fight against ‘communism’. Anyone who didn’t knuckle under was branded as supporting communism and would then be subject to US interference. This could include assassination, invasion, and subversion. All this under the name of freedom.
The New York Times has an article about this as well.
- “Even as the air war in Afghanistan wanes and American-backed forces hunt down pockets of Al Qaeda and Taliban resistance there, the United States is preparing a military presence in Central Asia that could last for years, military officials say.”
This presence is to go with the new puppet government of Afghanistan. At the very least, if you deny the ruthless aims of the United States you cannot deny the fact that this recent action has led to large-scale destabilization in the region and to the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, most of them women and children. It is likely that other governments will seize upon this idea and start their own wars against ‘terror’. In fact, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, and Israel have already done so.
The US Government must be somewhat concerned by all this talk of civilian casualties. They’ve got Afghan-born US envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, a former adviser to oil giant Unocal, out pushing the US message:
- “The envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, said that “you have to weigh the risks of ending the conflict prematurely with the costs [innocent lives] of continuing it,” adding, “I have no doubt, on balance, that we will continue until we achieve our goals.”
Is the United States a terrorist organization? The definition of terrorism: “terrorism n : the systematic use of violence as a means to intimidate or coerce societies or governments” You be the judge.