Thursday, November 12, 2009

war news


In his column at Salon today, Glenn Greenwald, one of the country's premier political reporters, has a story culled from the New York Times which details the corruption and gross criminality at the heart of the American war machine. Read it a and weep.

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However, the corruption of the war machine isn't really news, but this is: Obama is rethinking his tentative decision to cave in to the military's demands for 30 to 40,000 more troops to throw into the Afghani meatgrinder. This is the work of Obama's ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, who has lost faith in the Karzai government and publicly opposes any further escalation of the war.

I picked this up via Atrios, and the full story is here at FireDogLake.

If this is true, I may have to re-think my feelings about Obama, who may prove belatedly to have a spine after all. And if he decides to deny McChrystal and the other generals their latest demand for more human sacrifice, we might even finally get an answer to the most important question of all: Who's in charge here? Is the American government, including its military establishment, still under the control of the civilian authorities as the Constitution requires, or are we living under a military dictatorship?

1 comment:

Joe said...

I reconcile myself to Obama by realizing that he is three times better than GWB. That right there is a gigantic default accomplishment.

I hope Obama starts to withdraw. Then talk to the Taliban. We're not going to be able to physically obliterate people who will fight to the end because they have nothing to lose according to the sum of their life experience, and too little to gain by selling their souls as they see things.

Moral: countries of the world, quit being deceptive in foreign policy. Then Russia wouldn't have invaded and we wouldn't have created the Taliban in counter strategy.