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.

Even George Will says:Time to get out of Afghanistan!

George F. Will, one of America's most prominent conservatives,

says: Enough is enough! The Washington establishment should keep faith with its soldiers by rapidly reversing America's involvement in Afghanistan. Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country.

And that's, all, folks, as Porky Pig used to say!!

I Didn't Want to be Part of this Insane Mission!!

Not my words, but those of Heike Groos, a doctor serving with the German army in Afghanistan. She testifies how the situation has deteriorated to the point of paranoia. The longer she was there, the more doubts she had behind the German "mission" in that country: A suicide bomber blew up one of the German buses, killing four soldiers instantly, and seriously wounding many more. Even to this day, she is still haunted by the memories of the dead German soldiers, who died for an oil and gas pipeline, so that multinational corporations could make record profits!

Meanwhile, NATO handed the Taliban a big political victory because of air strikes in the northern province of Kunduz, which left over 100 people dead and injured. The Taliban portrayed the incident as an intentional massacre. In Germany, well over two thirds of the country already favor a withdrawal of the 4,500 German contingent. Chancellor Angela Merkel demanded that the "international community" needed to apply pressure on Kabul to insure that the international engagement can be reduced.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Don't Mess with Afghanistan!!!

Jane Stillwater has it RIGHT! Had we permitted George W. to treat America to a third term, our current policy in that bloody country of Afghanistan, where superpowers go to be humiliated, would be exactly the same as under the "new", and "modern" Obama regime: Please click on the title to read more, including not only Jane's perceptive report - "Don't Mess with Afghanistan", but also that of Robert Scheer: "Obama's Meaningless War". It was because of "W"that We, the Veterans of another futile war (for me it was 'Nam), formed veteransagainsttorture.com in the futile hope that our honorable service to our great nation not be dragged through our enemies' muddy interpretation of our freely-given measure of pain and torment.

Those of us who voted for Obama sincerely believed that we could now hold our head proudly among the other nations. Unfortunately, WE WERE WRONG!!