Afghanistan: another failure of "nation building"

The US spent 20 years, around $1 trillion (closer to $2 trillion if you count long-term costs like treatment for soldiers), over 2300 American soldier lives - to say nothing of time, money and lives spent by European and other countries - trying to build Afghanistan into a viable state. 

 By many accounts, the Afghan army was staffed by decent men who were not given the tools to succeed by their corrupt political non-leaders. 

All that money, time and lives and the country is heading back to square one with the barbarians back in control. It's a tragic day for the people of Afghanistan, who’ve seen many tragic decades. 

No one seriously believes another few months or years would've made much of a difference in that regard.
 

Can we Americans please finally admit that imperialism and nation-building is something that can no longer work in the modern world (ignoring whether it was ever morally justified)? Let's stop starting wars that we are incapable - that no one is capable - of finishing. In the end, the only people who will have benefited from the last 20 years is "defense" contractor stockholders.

Helping the less fortunate is the most Christian of values

I read with interest this article on how government checks during the pandemic have helped ease the suffering of many Americans.

I've been working and paying taxes since I was 14 years old.

Other than Pell Grants in college, there is not one time I've taken a dime of money in direct public aid. Not unemployment. Not welfare. Not HEAP. Nothing else. Not once.

Do I resent that I work hard and pay taxes to help out those less fortunate?

NOT ONE DAMN BIT.

Even though a small minority might take advantage of it?

Still NOT ONE DAMN BIT.

No reason to throw the baby out with the bath water.

The reason why is very simple.

I've personally known a lot of people who have been unemployed and were the furthest thing from lazy. I've seen proof of the old saying that you work harder when you're trying to find a job than when you have a job. I've seen the shame and humiliation these good people felt for a situation that, quite often, was no fault of their own. And that's even without privileged jackasses crapping on them.

Do I resent that I was working hard to ease their misfortune?

NOT ONE DAMN BIT.

But the reason is simpler. I was raised in a household with Christian values. I recall the old saying "There but for the grace of God go I."

If I lost my job after working hard for all those years and some schmuck crapped on me for it, I wouldn't be too thrilled.

And if after paying into system for over 30 years, someone called me lazy or a leech because I tried to get a fraction of that back, I might well punch them in the mouth.

I try to have empathy for others - except the cruel - because my luck might run out at some point and I would want others to be decent to me in such a situation. It's the civilized human being thing to do.

There are literally thousands of things I resent my tax dollars going toward. Corporate welfare. Imperialism. Funding foreign armies who commit human rights abuses.

I would much rather my tax dollars go toward easing human suffering than causing it. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/02/nation/stimulus-checks-substantially-reduced-hardship-study-shows/?p1=BGSearch_Overlay_Results&fbclid=IwAR3LqKe53Yn3z4uHjHzNIdvUuz8H-OD4Gd17QLFtS0uE2ANmwrESgeyfwCI

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Below is my annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day essay. Those who turn Dr. King into some sort of saccharine saint, as being solely about government equality under law for all skin colors, trivialize his struggle. He was about that, but about much more than that. His struggle was about the dignity of human beings, in the broadest sense. This New York Times essay says it best: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.

***

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them

I’ve decided I’m not going to listen to the president’s sales pitch for yet another war with a Muslim country that poses no threat to us after hearing his secretary of state angrily lie, “We are not talking about going to war!”

If this administration is going to deem cyber attacks an act of war and then declare that cruise missile strikes are not, it’s not worthy of trust.

Why are chemical weapons deaths worse than conventional weapons deaths?

Discussion topic: the UN estimates that approximately 100,000 people have been killed during the Syrian civil war (not all by Assad’s forces) with conventional weapons over the course of a few years. There has been no serious discussion of a response by external military powers in that time period.

Yet a single attack of chemical weapons that kills a small fraction of that number of people “necessitates” a global (ie: western) military response, we are told.

So why is it that the 1400 deaths caused by chemical weapons is more “morally repugnant,” to use Sec. of State Kerry’s phrase, than the 100,000 deaths that preceded it by conventional weapons?

If the answer is some piece of paper called a treaty, then the follow up question is why does that piece of paper value chemical weapons deaths more? Why does it view those deaths as more of a threat when, by any objective measurement, conventional weapons cause far more deaths and are much more of a threat to international stability?

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Below is my annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day essay. Those who turn Dr. King into some sort of saccharine saint, as being solely about government equality under law for all skin colors, trivialize his struggle. He was about that, but about much more than that. His struggle was about the dignity of human beings, in the broadest sense. This New York Times essay says it best: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.

***

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Liars and the lies militarists tell

So let me get this straight. In 1979, militarists in the US said we needed to impose an arms embargo against the theocratic regime in Iran. By 1986, they were saying we needed to sell arms to theocratic Iran, in violation of the embargo they demanded, so we could use the money to destabilize Central America. Now, the militarists who armed theocratic Iran saying we need to launch some sort of aggression against them, to use that Orwellian phrase, in order to 'preserve peace' because... they allegedly won't disarm. Why exactly would anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skills still be listening to these people?

Iran not a threat to Israel, but olive trees are

The former head of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet has denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Deputy PM Ehud Barak for misleading the public on the threat posed by Iran and for having their feelings clouded by "messianic judgment." He also said that "I don't have faith in the current leadership of Israel to lead us in an event of this magnitude."

A few days earlier, the current head of the Israeli armed forces also veered from the militaristic Script and said he doubts Iran will really try to build a nuclear bomb. He rightly described the Iranian regime as vile but not suicidal.

I assume both of these men are anti-Semitic and hope for the death of the Israeli state, like we're told all critics of the Israeli government's policies supposedly are.

Meanwhile, fanatical settlers launched an operation against an apparent grave threat to their security: olive trees. Or perhaps their real enemy is rationality and civilized behavior.

Update: Former justice and foreign minister Tzipi Livni recently resigned Israel's Knesset (parliament) denouncing the country's leadership. She said that the 'existential threat' to Jewish state comes not from Iran but from Israel's own government.

The media's complicity in the rush to war against Iran

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has an article about the militaristic establishment's preparations for another military aggression, this time against Iran, and the media's complicity with this insanity.

The below graphic lists the dozens of US military bases in the region that surrounds Iran (the country in blue in the middle), thus showing how Iran is a threat to America.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Below is my annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day essay. Those who turn Dr. King into some sort of saccharine saint, as being solely about government equality under law for all skin colors, trivialize his struggle. He was about that, but about much more than that. His struggle was about the dignity of human beings, in the broadest sense. This New York Times essay says it best: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial.

***

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

The 20 year war in Afghanistan and the failure of regime change

Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the American invasion of Afghanistan. A decade into what's already this country's longest war, former US commander of NATO forces in the country (retired) Gen. Stanley McChrystal says that the mission in Afghanistan is only half done. 

The Guardian article added: McChrystal said the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq less than two years after entering Afghanistan made the Afghan effort more difficult. "I think they were made more difficult, clearly," he said, because the Iraq invasion "changed the Muslim world's view of America's effort..."

He pointed out that, as is so often the case in the United States' clumsy foreign policy decisions, everyone involved "had a very superficial understanding of the situation and [Afghan] history" and culture and that US forces did not make an attempt to learn the country's languages -- not a task one would normally expect of soldiers but critical to any successful nation building.

The morass in Afghanistan is so deep that the country's president Hamid Karzai, took a (very brief) break from blaming Pakistan, to admit his own government's miserable failure in the security realm.

Speaking of the topic, this essay in The Boston Review points out that, despite supposedly altruistic reasons and despite widespread bipartisan support most of the time, US-imposed regime change simply doesn't work... at least not for the people of the 'helped' country in question.

Americans tend to personalize their conflicts. Almost every target of U.S. intervention in the post-Cold War world has been labeled another Hitler... Since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the United States has become the world’s foremost practitioner of regime change... 

Obama's illegal war in Libya

Here are a couple of articles regarding Pres. Obama's illegal war in Libya...

-Obama rejects top lawyers' legal views on Libya (that the war required Congressional approval): Salon.com

-Obama is bringing America closer to the imperial presidency than Bush ever did: Foreign Policy.

Obama's illegal war

Even the establishment magazine Foreign Policy ran a piece highlighting the illegality of Pres. Obama's war against Libya.

Update: Obama's spokesman offered a defense of the imperial presidency that would have made Karl Rove blush (if such a thing were possible). Liberals would not doubt have burned him in effigy were his name George W. Bush. Instead, the silence of liberals who once patted themselves on the back for being “anti-war” is deafening.

I saw somewhere a Q&A on the War Powers Act and I was going to forward it to Obama and to Congress, but apparently there are actually a few lawmakers who are familiar with the law. 10 of them filed suit against the president and secretary of war for violations of the act.

The deceit of a warmonger

Since liberals rabidly denounced Bush's false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you'd think they'd at least notice Obama's false claims that our intervention in Libya is only to provide humanitarian relief, not to take sides in a civil war. But I guess you get a free pass to warmonger if you have a (D) after your name or have a Nobel Peace Prize on your resume.

Too bad liberals are more likely to get their panties in a twist about the inane rantings of trivial people like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin than anything that actually matters. And they are mystified why the regressive conservative agenda is advancing so fast.

Priorities

Four stories I read this week are very interesting when juxtaposed...

-North Country Public Radio is doing a series on New York’s crumbling infrastructure.

-School districts across the region are slashing teaching positions left and right.

-Districts in Glens Falls and Saranac Lake each closed an elementary school.

-President Obama ordered air strikes against Libya and our Hitler-of-the-month, with little objection from his fellow Democrats... thus illustrating that having a Nobel Peace Prize on your resumé seems to give you a free pass in launching wars. Mother Jones cites a CNN estimate that costs for the US to fully install a no-fly-zone over Libya could rise to some $800 million, and another $100 million a week to maintain it


We “can’t afford” badly needed improvements to our infrastructure.

We “can’t afford” to preserve teaching positions originally deemed important.

We “can’t afford” to keep community elementary schools open.

We “can afford” to wage wars against countries that pose no security threat to us.

Of course, the reality is the above questions are not at all about what we can and can’t afford. They are about what we choose to afford.

Our choices seem to indicate that destroying things abroad is more important use of our money than building things at home.

Dr. King's real dream: dignity for all

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize for his advocacy against segregation and other forms of state-sponsored racism. On this national holiday honoring him, it's worth remembering that King viewed as more than mere legal racial equality. He viewed the struggle more broadly as one in favor of human dignity. This is why he did not retire from public life following legalistic victories such as Brown vs the Board of Education or the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Although legal segregation was crumbling in the last years of his life, Dr. King did not diminish his activism in any way. He merely refocused it toward another aspect of human dignity.

At the time of his assassination in 1968, King was in Memphis as part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SLCC) Poor People's Campaign, where the city's garbage workers were protesting against unlivable wages. The SLCC had conceived the campaign as a way to mobilize poor people of all skin colors on behalf of a federal economic plan to rebuild American cities.

King realized that the end of state-imposed segregation would not improve the lives of black people if they remained miserably poor. In much the same way the lives of blacks in the south remained virtually unchanged long after the 'transition' from slavery to sharecropping.

King viewed the campaign part as the second phase of the civil rights' struggle. He viewed endemic poverty as a civil rights' issue.

This commitment to human dignity animated another lesser known aspect of King's work: his opposition to the Vietnam War and to militarism more broadly.

During his Beyond Vietnam speech given exactly one year before his murder, he explained why opposition to the aggression against Vietnam had entered into his activism:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos of the north], I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

Americans were being shipped off to Vietnam to kill, to destroy and to die. Nothing good was happening because of this. And King knew that the war machine specifically sought those with few other economic options to serve as its cannon fodder, a situation that's little different today.

Like many social justice advocates before and since, he deplored how much of our national resources (both financial and human) was wasted on fabricating foreign enemies to obliterate. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom," he warned.

King probably realized that the fact that many young people had few other economic options was no accident, but the result of conscious policy choices made to ensure an insatiable monster created, funded and propped up by your tax dollars always had food.

(It's not the only insatiable monster but the other main one merits an entry of its own)

To restrict Dr. King's legacy to the fight for legal equality for black people is to sell him short. And it's misleads people into believing that his dream has been realized. His true struggle was the quest for human dignity for all people.

He could be no clearer about this when he concluded his Beyond Vietnam speech:

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

If you truly want to honor him, then follow this injunction.

Dr. King and the military-industrial complex

On tomorrow's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday, I will repost an essay I wrote a few years ago about Dr. King's real legacy, a legacy that shows him as a much bigger man than the one most Americans. Much like Muhammad Ali, Dr. King is now usually portrayed as a sacharrine figure, with ideas that are largely apolitical and non-controversial. However much like Ali, who famously declared "No VietCong ever called me nigger," the full range of King's beliefs are as controversial today as they were in the late 1960s. Or would be if people actually knew them.

The truth is that while some did indeed hate Dr. King for the color of his skin, many others came to hate him for the content of his character. Many applauded when he preached non-violence in opposition to American apartheid, but made him a hate figure when he expanded that non-violence into opposition to the US aggression against the Vietnamese people and to American militarism more broadly.

But in a poignant coincidence, tomorrow is also the 50th anniversary of Pres. Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address, a speech almost entirely devoted to warning against the danger of the 'unwarranted influence' of the military-industrial complex.

He noted that: This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience [in 1961]. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Eisenhower made these observations not as a long-haired, anti-establishment troublemaker but as a widely acclaimed war hero and 'as one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war' first hand.

Sadly, the nation did not heed Pres. Eisenhower's warnings. The military-industrial complex drew stronger and stronger during the 1960s (and continues of course unchallenged to this day). It's against that plundering of resources, both material and human, that Dr. King devoted his latter days to fighting.

Ike's 'garrison state'

James Ledbetter had a good op-ed in yesterday's New York Times on the 50th anniversary of Pres. Dwight Eisenhower's famous warning against the undue influence of the military-industrial complex.

Even at the early stage in the Cold War, Gen. Eisenhower had noted with dismay the development of "a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."

The World War II hero was concerned about the military-industrial complex not because he was a pacifist but because he worried about the armed forces' relationship with the larger society and the potentially corrosive influence on public policy.

It is not a stretch to believe that this armaments industry — which profits not only from domestic sales but also from tens of billions of dollars in annual exports — manipulates public policy to perpetuate itself.

But Eisenhower was concerned about more than just the military’s size; he also worried about its relationship to the American economy and society, and that the economy risked becoming a subsidiary of the military.

And that

Eisenhower warned that the influence of the military-industrial complex was “economic, political, even spiritual” and that it was “felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.”

[...]

On this score, Eisenhower may well have seen today’s America as losing the battle against the darker aspects of the military-industrial complex. He was no pacifist, but he was a lifelong opponent of what he called a “garrison state,” in which policy and rights are defined by the shadowy needs of an all-powerful military elite.

Ike's warning is just as relevant today, if not more so, than it was in 1960.

Bloodthirsty cowards or 'defenders of freedom'?

It's interesting how many self-proclaimed 'freedom loves' (said breathlessly) are really nothing more than bloodthirsty cowards whose instinctive reaction toward the actual exercise of freedom always seems to be one of violence.

Witness Jonah Goldberg who thinks that there hasn't been enough carnage. The right-wing extremist syndicated columnist bemoans the fact that Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange hasn't yet been assassinated.

Oops, my bad.

According to FoxNews.com's Christian Wilton, another bloodthirsty coward who wants The Assange Problem to *cough* disappear, the new euphemism for assassination is a 'non-judicial action.'

And given all the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan who've perished via 'non-judicial actions,' one wonders why the esteemed New York Times pooh-poohed Assange for going into hiding.

Non-shock of the week: Iraq invasion helped terrorists

Documents reveal that al-Qaeda gained influence in Iraq only AFTER the US invasion.

Yes... the same US invasion that was justified by the fradulent claim that it was designed to expel al-Qaeda from Iraq.

That the aggression against Iraq helped increase terrorism exponentially is not a new revelation.

But it's a reminder that the people who conjured up the invasion should not be enjoying a peaceful retirement. In fact, they should not be enjoying freedom at all.