Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ BREAKING: Experts are worried the Afghanistan withdrawal may lead to the spread of global terrorism now that the terrorists are no longer tied up with the task of occupying Afghanistan. ❖ Welcome back to Serious News Network. For years experts have been trying to understand how dropping military explosives on people could fail to advance humanitarian aims. Here to shed some light on this mystery is an employee of a think tank that's funded by arms manufacturers.
"Experts are worried the Afghanistan withdrawal may lead to the spread of global terrorism." No they’re not. First, pundits are not experts. People like Bolton have horrible track records predicting world events. They are more accurately professional prevaricators and provocateurs.
For most my military career and into retirement, whenever I hear people assert that Bush's Foreverwars have saved the USA from global terrorism, my retort is this: "We are safe from terrorism because camels cannot swim." Most people in these backwater Middle East countries a) cannot speak English, b) have never set foot on a commercial airliners, c) would not know how to buy a ticket to the USA or EU, d) even if they do know how to buy a ticket, they lack the funds, e) even if they had the funds and bought a ticket, they have no idea how to navigate once at their destination, nor how to obtain weapons and bombs. Thus, as we have seen over the years, the few who try get caught before they do any harm. A through E have not changed in 20 years.
We also need to remember that Bin Laden was not even in Afghanistan. He met his end in his terrorist command compound (LOL) in Pakistan. The post-Afghanistan torrent of journalism reflects that the War on Terror has been mostly gaslight. Matt Yglesias recently posted an interesting essay [https://www.slowboring.com/p/afghan-war] reminding us how we got into this mess by describing the DOD doctrine driving post-9/11 military action. Afghanistan was basically a smokescreen that opened the door to invading Iraq - the target all along (unfinished Bush family business). Cheney knew all along that WMD was fiction, so his staff isolated the WH from those with knowledge of Iraq's lack of WMD until after their useful idiot had convinced Congress that the WMD threat was real. At least Powell had the integrity to resign once it became obvious that he was a patsy. The US would be better off focusing its war on terror inward - on the rising tide of American fascism.
Try as I might, I can't think of one damn thing of worth that John Bolton could possibly say. That CNN either doesn't realize this or doesn't care is emblematic of all our unwatchable and useless corporate media.
Those gnashing their polished teeth over the poor mistreated masses suffering in Afghanistan, China, and Cuba, puzzle me as to their decades-long disregard for those suffering in Gaza and the West Bank; however, we could expand that to include Detroit and Camden and Richmond as long as we're cranking up the old Faux Concern Meter.
We. Are. Being. Screwed. This is not that hard to understand and fits easily on a bumper sticker for those of us who can still afford cars.
Thank you for your service? Go fuck yourself is more like it.
I see that the US Air Force is already upping their plea for funds so desperately needed. Apparently, it is important that we keep up with the arms race we are creating.
I think this was a very good article Caitlin, late stage capitalism is terrifying.
Taliban brutality was such a perfect foil for the shitlib’s pieties that it could sustain a 20 year engagement with our friends in the media (both sides) trumpeting the narrative of - “America brings freedom to poor oppressed Afghan women “.
"The extent to which you are able to recognize this is the extent to which you are unplugged from the partisan puppet show."
The key point. The moment you hear arguments about US militarism posed as D or R, stop reading, stop listening. Run the other way. War is bipartisan because moving wealth upward to elite overlords is bipartisan. To do it by force of arms is injustice in every sense --- to the attacked rendered homeless, dead , or injured, to the poor attacking dupes who give their bodies to the war machine, to the populace who watches tax-dollar wealth disappear into the greedy maws of corrupt politicians, generals, and military contractor-elites. To the environment which is almost always damaged --- even beyond the stat that B-52 bombers consume 3300 gal of fossil fuel per hour. If, as Cornel West posits, justice is the public face of love, than one must also posit that the cumulative injustices of war are the public face of a deteriorating culture steeped in hatred. Imperialist Capitalism is doomed to die of its own hatred.
Angst, I always feel Caitlin’s angst in her writing and I share it.
I think the exigent realities of of living cause nearly everyone to lose their capacity for truthfulness. We are a race, we are in a headlong competition, we fight tooth and nail against gravity time and each other.
Caitlin makes common sense observations, supports them with myriad examples and excoriates our murderous greed.
I'm starting to question whether I've been burdened with "Biden Derangement Syndrome." I still think he's essentially evil and all his policies are in service of himself first and after that global elites, but I had assumed that his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan by 9-11 was a total lie and he had no intention of withdrawing. Now, I'm not so sure.
I think Biden and/or his top tier advisors realized that Afghanistan is an albatross and made a genuine and sincere decision to withdraw. As that became more and more apparent to the war profiteers infecting his regime's 2nd tier of hierarchy, just as they had infected the previous Trump regime, they made a decision (consciously or unconsciously) to sabotage the withdrawal and make it a disaster that could deter similar decisions in the future. Thus, rather than advising NGOs and aid workers to get out, and spiriting high level Afghan collaborators out, they allowed those people to remain. The entire withdrawal procedure was dominated by "passive aggression" at the second tier level of bureaucracy. I support Biden's one good act, but the redeployment to DRC shows that evil is still in control.
In the rest of the article, Caitlin once again conflates capitalism with corporatism, Mom and Pop's store with monopolies, a desire to control the proceeds of one's own lifetime of hard work with the privilege of acquiring wealth through investments in multiple corporations whose profits are privatized while their debts are soicalized, and well-meaning right-libertarians who don't recognize the evils of limited liability with corporate oligarchs in charge of military contractors, bankers, silicon valley and Hollywood. Caitlin and others on the antiwar left need to listen to and understand the libertarian right (and vice verse).
When the power structure in the imperialist world resides first in how money itself comes into existence - by declaration of the imperialist - then it makes damned little sense to talk about taxation, spending, morality, etc. instead of money systems and the very definition of money and the structure of how it is implemented.
The tax structures in imperialist societies have always been such that the lower classes are taxed in the form of the imposed monetary unit that the imperialist creates ahead of and apart from the activity of the populace. This mandate that the taxes must be in the form of the imposed monetary unit that only the imperial overlord can create, as opposed to 'in kind' contributions of people to the social good, means that the labor and resources are at the whim of the overlord to control and direct.
But it is important to know the order of things. It is the illiterate and illegitimate claim over money creation itself that pays the soldiers before ANY tax is collected!
The sovereign 'authority' to spend and then tax is a trap by which The People are ensnared into militarism they do not want. An ancient strategy called out by David Graeber in his book "Debt: The First 5000 Years." Simple plan really - government declares its supreme authority to issue currency and first spends it into existence on the military. Then the self proclaimed authoritarian government (same self declared nonsense as the Divine Right Of Kings but disguised under the façade of ‘free and fair elections’) declares that The People must pay a tax with the 'coin of the realm' that the government first spent into existence with the military. (Yes, that very military industrial complex - the MIC - Eisenhower warned against.) And, wham, The People must do business with the MIC. The military needs to be fed, clothed, housed, outfitted, etc.
The soldiers are the ones at the head of the pay line of the asinine imperialist power structure. Without the soldiers the imperialist has no one to kick ass for them. From there it becomes an easy control mechanism to get the populace to support the military even if they do not want war. The feudal lord simply paid the soldiers and military folk in the coin of the realm, and the populace would then have to 'do business' with the 'military complex' (or get their asses kicked by them) in order to obtain the necessary coinage to pay taxes. There is nothing substantially different in our present system.
It is precisely the framework of the operating system of authoritarian control over the creation of the economic unit that precludes democracy, ‘free’ enterprise, and peace.
That then compels us all to look at the history of the asinine notion that some 'authority' exists that must create the acCounting unit ahead of and apart from the genuine economic activity that these units will be used to represent. It is acceptance by the populace of the assertion of that kind of authoritarian control over the very creation of the unit of acCount (a long history presented by Graeber and others) that leaves the populace helplessly and hopelessly at war. If we are going to stop the war mongering then We The People must stop whining about the misuse of this illiterate power to create the acCounting unit by the imperialist and define the thing called money in a logical manner according to its acCounting/annotation/record keeping function. We are at a place where we must acquire monetary literacy and establish a rational system as opposed to attempting some kind of behavior modification within a system that is completely irrational and illiterate! The symbols we use to represent the units of value embodied in genuine things of value cannot also BE the value itself! The populace is still not differentiating between abstract representation and the real stuff that is represented in the abstract units!
The $2 trillion that was earned by the warmongers should be repaid by them in the form of paying for the evacuation (to the US) and rehabilitation (housing, jobs, medical care, etc., also in the USA) of the refugees. (I have the $2 trillion figure here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10161832981122837&set=a.142210122836.)
"Experts are worried the Afghanistan withdrawal may lead to the spread of global terrorism." No they’re not. First, pundits are not experts. People like Bolton have horrible track records predicting world events. They are more accurately professional prevaricators and provocateurs.
For most my military career and into retirement, whenever I hear people assert that Bush's Foreverwars have saved the USA from global terrorism, my retort is this: "We are safe from terrorism because camels cannot swim." Most people in these backwater Middle East countries a) cannot speak English, b) have never set foot on a commercial airliners, c) would not know how to buy a ticket to the USA or EU, d) even if they do know how to buy a ticket, they lack the funds, e) even if they had the funds and bought a ticket, they have no idea how to navigate once at their destination, nor how to obtain weapons and bombs. Thus, as we have seen over the years, the few who try get caught before they do any harm. A through E have not changed in 20 years.
We also need to remember that Bin Laden was not even in Afghanistan. He met his end in his terrorist command compound (LOL) in Pakistan. The post-Afghanistan torrent of journalism reflects that the War on Terror has been mostly gaslight. Matt Yglesias recently posted an interesting essay [https://www.slowboring.com/p/afghan-war] reminding us how we got into this mess by describing the DOD doctrine driving post-9/11 military action. Afghanistan was basically a smokescreen that opened the door to invading Iraq - the target all along (unfinished Bush family business). Cheney knew all along that WMD was fiction, so his staff isolated the WH from those with knowledge of Iraq's lack of WMD until after their useful idiot had convinced Congress that the WMD threat was real. At least Powell had the integrity to resign once it became obvious that he was a patsy. The US would be better off focusing its war on terror inward - on the rising tide of American fascism.
Try as I might, I can't think of one damn thing of worth that John Bolton could possibly say. That CNN either doesn't realize this or doesn't care is emblematic of all our unwatchable and useless corporate media.
Those gnashing their polished teeth over the poor mistreated masses suffering in Afghanistan, China, and Cuba, puzzle me as to their decades-long disregard for those suffering in Gaza and the West Bank; however, we could expand that to include Detroit and Camden and Richmond as long as we're cranking up the old Faux Concern Meter.
We. Are. Being. Screwed. This is not that hard to understand and fits easily on a bumper sticker for those of us who can still afford cars.
Thank you for your service? Go fuck yourself is more like it.
I see that the US Air Force is already upping their plea for funds so desperately needed. Apparently, it is important that we keep up with the arms race we are creating.
I think this was a very good article Caitlin, late stage capitalism is terrifying.
Taliban brutality was such a perfect foil for the shitlib’s pieties that it could sustain a 20 year engagement with our friends in the media (both sides) trumpeting the narrative of - “America brings freedom to poor oppressed Afghan women “.
"The extent to which you are able to recognize this is the extent to which you are unplugged from the partisan puppet show."
The key point. The moment you hear arguments about US militarism posed as D or R, stop reading, stop listening. Run the other way. War is bipartisan because moving wealth upward to elite overlords is bipartisan. To do it by force of arms is injustice in every sense --- to the attacked rendered homeless, dead , or injured, to the poor attacking dupes who give their bodies to the war machine, to the populace who watches tax-dollar wealth disappear into the greedy maws of corrupt politicians, generals, and military contractor-elites. To the environment which is almost always damaged --- even beyond the stat that B-52 bombers consume 3300 gal of fossil fuel per hour. If, as Cornel West posits, justice is the public face of love, than one must also posit that the cumulative injustices of war are the public face of a deteriorating culture steeped in hatred. Imperialist Capitalism is doomed to die of its own hatred.
Angst, I always feel Caitlin’s angst in her writing and I share it.
I think the exigent realities of of living cause nearly everyone to lose their capacity for truthfulness. We are a race, we are in a headlong competition, we fight tooth and nail against gravity time and each other.
Caitlin makes common sense observations, supports them with myriad examples and excoriates our murderous greed.
It seems simple but no one cares.
Taking John Bolton seriously is a job for imbeciles.
The End of the “Forever War”
On Cultural Imperialism and A War That Was Never About Women and Girls
https://savageminds.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-forever-war?fbclid=IwAR3OmOnfNoR92bB304nLymMfuo6w_fxqebmegWwVygOvQGyA9KeS-RNBRjg
Going forward U.S. Generals should be called CEO's. They are more concerned about war profits than the citizens they are bound to protect.
https://m-weddle.medium.com/oligarchy-wins-again-again-and-again-d08a9037386b
I'm starting to question whether I've been burdened with "Biden Derangement Syndrome." I still think he's essentially evil and all his policies are in service of himself first and after that global elites, but I had assumed that his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan by 9-11 was a total lie and he had no intention of withdrawing. Now, I'm not so sure.
I think Biden and/or his top tier advisors realized that Afghanistan is an albatross and made a genuine and sincere decision to withdraw. As that became more and more apparent to the war profiteers infecting his regime's 2nd tier of hierarchy, just as they had infected the previous Trump regime, they made a decision (consciously or unconsciously) to sabotage the withdrawal and make it a disaster that could deter similar decisions in the future. Thus, rather than advising NGOs and aid workers to get out, and spiriting high level Afghan collaborators out, they allowed those people to remain. The entire withdrawal procedure was dominated by "passive aggression" at the second tier level of bureaucracy. I support Biden's one good act, but the redeployment to DRC shows that evil is still in control.
In the rest of the article, Caitlin once again conflates capitalism with corporatism, Mom and Pop's store with monopolies, a desire to control the proceeds of one's own lifetime of hard work with the privilege of acquiring wealth through investments in multiple corporations whose profits are privatized while their debts are soicalized, and well-meaning right-libertarians who don't recognize the evils of limited liability with corporate oligarchs in charge of military contractors, bankers, silicon valley and Hollywood. Caitlin and others on the antiwar left need to listen to and understand the libertarian right (and vice verse).
When the power structure in the imperialist world resides first in how money itself comes into existence - by declaration of the imperialist - then it makes damned little sense to talk about taxation, spending, morality, etc. instead of money systems and the very definition of money and the structure of how it is implemented.
The tax structures in imperialist societies have always been such that the lower classes are taxed in the form of the imposed monetary unit that the imperialist creates ahead of and apart from the activity of the populace. This mandate that the taxes must be in the form of the imposed monetary unit that only the imperial overlord can create, as opposed to 'in kind' contributions of people to the social good, means that the labor and resources are at the whim of the overlord to control and direct.
But it is important to know the order of things. It is the illiterate and illegitimate claim over money creation itself that pays the soldiers before ANY tax is collected!
The sovereign 'authority' to spend and then tax is a trap by which The People are ensnared into militarism they do not want. An ancient strategy called out by David Graeber in his book "Debt: The First 5000 Years." Simple plan really - government declares its supreme authority to issue currency and first spends it into existence on the military. Then the self proclaimed authoritarian government (same self declared nonsense as the Divine Right Of Kings but disguised under the façade of ‘free and fair elections’) declares that The People must pay a tax with the 'coin of the realm' that the government first spent into existence with the military. (Yes, that very military industrial complex - the MIC - Eisenhower warned against.) And, wham, The People must do business with the MIC. The military needs to be fed, clothed, housed, outfitted, etc.
The soldiers are the ones at the head of the pay line of the asinine imperialist power structure. Without the soldiers the imperialist has no one to kick ass for them. From there it becomes an easy control mechanism to get the populace to support the military even if they do not want war. The feudal lord simply paid the soldiers and military folk in the coin of the realm, and the populace would then have to 'do business' with the 'military complex' (or get their asses kicked by them) in order to obtain the necessary coinage to pay taxes. There is nothing substantially different in our present system.
It is precisely the framework of the operating system of authoritarian control over the creation of the economic unit that precludes democracy, ‘free’ enterprise, and peace.
That then compels us all to look at the history of the asinine notion that some 'authority' exists that must create the acCounting unit ahead of and apart from the genuine economic activity that these units will be used to represent. It is acceptance by the populace of the assertion of that kind of authoritarian control over the very creation of the unit of acCount (a long history presented by Graeber and others) that leaves the populace helplessly and hopelessly at war. If we are going to stop the war mongering then We The People must stop whining about the misuse of this illiterate power to create the acCounting unit by the imperialist and define the thing called money in a logical manner according to its acCounting/annotation/record keeping function. We are at a place where we must acquire monetary literacy and establish a rational system as opposed to attempting some kind of behavior modification within a system that is completely irrational and illiterate! The symbols we use to represent the units of value embodied in genuine things of value cannot also BE the value itself! The populace is still not differentiating between abstract representation and the real stuff that is represented in the abstract units!
https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
Buckminster Fuller has already told us about this:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
The $2 trillion that was earned by the warmongers should be repaid by them in the form of paying for the evacuation (to the US) and rehabilitation (housing, jobs, medical care, etc., also in the USA) of the refugees. (I have the $2 trillion figure here: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10161832981122837&set=a.142210122836.)