Nothing we do will compel 125 million Muslims in Pakistan

to make common cause with a US in league with the two states that are unambiguously anti-muslim: Israel and India. As Porky Pig used to say: "Ibbedi, ibbedi, THAT'S ALL, FOLKS!!"

(Colonel Douglas Mac Gregor, USA, Retired.)

Obama: Taliban NOT a threat to the United States!!

President Obama and his advisers agree: The Taliban are an integral part of Afghanistan, and if you try to remove them from that land, you might as well take on the Republican Party of our country next.

No additional troops for Mc Crystal, no additional American soldiers whacked for the "New World Order", to fatten the wallets and spread sheets of our multi-national oil companies.

In other words, as Porky Pig used to say: "Ibbedy, ibbedy - That's all, folks"

Beware of our Army's exaggerated enemy casualty reports

When I served as Advisory Team Leader in Trung Lap, located in the heart of our enemy's "Iron Triangle", I had honestly reported five enemy casualties to my boss, Major Kurbow, at District Headquarters, during one of my "hairy" night missions. My truthful report was based on that morning's intensive analysis of our "enemies" prone shelters, which they had quickly dug in a Michelin rubber plantation next to Trung Lap. For a small amount of blood in one shelter, I logged one "WIA" (wounded). For a small bone fragment from a skull, I reported one "KIA", since I reasoned that a bullet which had pierced the brain would have been lethal to the hapless enemy fighter, etc, etc. When I visited my honest and highly moral boss at Cu Chi District later that day, I was told that he had doubled my enemy casualty report, since he thought "I might have missed some of the evidence". That same day, I had to visit the next higher headquarters at Hau Ngia province, where I was shocked to see that Major Kurbow's report had been doubled again! Back in our base at Trung Lap Military Post, my team and I had a good laugh over the continued enlargement of our report, and my XO reasoned that, with a few more headquarters than the ones I had visited, our team would get credit for destroying the entire North Vietnamese Army!

Why the Olympics went to Rio

During the "original" olympics, which began in 776 BC, it was traditional to proclaim a truce. Right now, we are in the middle of another world war, and thousands of our world's citizens are dying every moment, as a result of the drones scavenging the sky above Afghanistan and Pakistan for hapless victims.

It is my firm belief that the Olympic Committee was motivated by the tragedy caused by our malicious warfare to punish the United States for violating the olympic spirit by punishing this country for it's rude continuation of the murder of innocent civilians by making a loud and clear statement for the necessity for peace on this small and fragile planet.

PAX VOBISCUM!!

Stupid, Stupid, War

"Within the next generation, I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs or prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World."

from a letter to George Orwell, dated 21 October 1949.

From letters to Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith; Harper&Row, 1969. By the way, I worked with one of his close relatives in the Royal Canadian Army Cadets in Camp Ipperwash, Toronto, Canada.

PAX VOBISCUM

We're neck deep in the big muddy, and the big fool says to push on!

The American "generals" who are demanding more American cannon fodder to "save" their war in Afghanistan would do well to check Pete Seegar's song about "the big muddy". Their stupidity reminds me so much of my meeting with Captain Timmerman, the former aide de camp of the general who ran our 4th US Armored Division in Goeppingen, Germany, while I worked there as Intelligence Operations Officer for that Division.

When I accidentally ran into him in Camp Enari, the American base of our army near Pleiku, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, he bent my ear for several minutes, telling me how much he envied my job in active combat, and how much he also wanted to be "Where the Action is".

To get that windbag off my back, I offered an immediate visit to his personnel officer, trading my combat job for his desk assignment. This immediately got the loudmouth to shut up, and he stuttered while walking away.

So would be the reaction of our generals in Afghanistan, if they could be assured that they would actually have to put their neck on the line to achieve an American victory!

Afghanistan: Haunted by the Ghosts of Vietnam

As always, the Journalist Eric Margolis is right on the mark: Our 107,000 Soldiers in Afghanistan are haunted by the ghosts of Vietnam. As I experienced with the 1/10 Cavalry Squadron in the areas around Banmethuot, Pleiku, and later as Advisory Team Leader north of Kontum and in the hotly contested "Iron Triangle" area around and near Trung Lap, most of "our" Vietnamese allies were no match for the highly dedicated Vietcong enemy, and I sadly began to realize that our ultimate defeat would only be a matter of time!

So will it be in Afghanistan. Like Vietnam, the war is about oil (and gas). In Vietnam, after the remnants of our beaten army barely made an ungraceful helicopter exit from one of the taller buildings in the surrounded and besieged South Vietnamese city of Saigon (now re-named Ho-Chi Minh City), Forbes did an article in 1973, which listed all of the off-shore oil and gas properties which had been of interest to our slimy capitalists, for whom so many of my friends had died in agonizing pain.

This is not true in Afghanistan: Though there is neither oil nor gas in that rocky and barren land, our war is merely about "our" ability to build and defend a pipeline from the areas north of Afghanistan, mostly for the benefit of our multi-national oil barons.