One Photo Shows That We Have Destroyed Nature: Polar Bears Seen Killing & Eating Dolphins That Have Been Forced North By Global Warming

Image shows apparently very hungry bears eating dolphins for the first time, before freezing the leftovers in the snow.

Oldspeak:”The worlds oceans are boiling, acidifying and deoxygenating. As a result dolphins are ending up in the fucking arctic ocean that used to be covered in ice to avoid the conditions in the tropics. Polar bears whose habitats are rapidly shrinking and food sources dying off, likely because the Ocean is turning into a fucking toxic soup, have had to resort to eating those dolphins and saving their carcasses for later in the snow. Yeeaaaaaah. That’s normal.O_o Just another day in paradise kids, nothin to see here! LOOK! There’s a Church Shooting! OOOH! Donald Trump is running for president. OMG that white woman thinks she’s black! Enjoy your regularly scheduled Infotainment.” -OSJ

By Andrew Griffin @ The U.K. Independent:

It marks the first time that bears have been seen killing and eating dolphins. Usually, the dolphins only go up north during the warmer summer — but this year they have arrived in spring.

The bears catch the dolphins in a similar way to the seals that they usually eat. Both animals keep holes in the ice which they use to come up and breathe from — at which point, if the bear is lucky, it will snatch them up and eat them.

The researchers observed the behaviour for the first time last year. At least six different bears have been seen eating the dolphins since then, scientists write in a new report, ‘White-beaked dolphins trapped in the ice and eaten by polar bears’.

After eating the dolphin, the bear seemed to cover it with ice so that it could be kept for later. Such behaviour is rare in polar bears, and could be a result of the animals not having enough to eat.

The authors of the study describe the bear as having “clearly visible ribs” and being “very skinny”.

The habitat of polar bears is shrinking drastically as the Arctic warms. As such, scientists expect to be able to observe them much less in the coming years.

The same global warming appears to be trapping the dolphins, leaving them stuck and so able to be caught by the bears.

“We suggest [the dolphins] were trapped in the ice after strong northerly winds the days before, and possibly killed when forced to surface for air at a small opening in the ice,” the authors of the study write. White-beaked dolphins tend to travel north to Svalbard during the warmer summer, but haven’t been reported so far north in the early Spring.

Usually, the Svalbard fjords and coast is covered by ice. But in the winter of 2013 and 2014, when the dolphins and bears were first seen together, they were ice free.

Destroying What Remains: As The Arctic Dies & Melts Away, The US Navy Plans For War Games In The Arctic

The USS Cowpens launches a Harpoon Missile from the aft missile deck as part of a live-fire exercise, September 12, 2012. (Photo: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Paul Kelly/US Navy; Edited: JR/TO)

Oldspeak: “Given that the Navy has been making plans for “ice-free” operations in the Arctic since at least 2001, their June “Northern Edge” exercises may well prove to be just the opening salvo in the future northern climate wars, with whales, seals, and salmon being the first in the line of fire.

In April 2001, a Navy symposium entitled “Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic” was mounted to begin to prepare the service for a climate-change-induced future. Fast forward to June 2015. In what the military refers to as Alaska’s “premier” joint training exercise, Alaskan Command aims to conduct “Northern Edge” over 8,429 nautical miles, which include critical habitat for all five wild Alaskan salmon species and 377 other species of marine life. The upcoming war games in the Gulf of Alaska will not be the first such exercises in the region — they have been conducted, on and off, for the last 30 years — but they will be the largest by far. In fact, a 360 percent rise in munitions use is expected, according to Emily Stolarcyk, the program manager for the Eyak Preservation Council (EPC).” -Dahr Jamail

“Another absurd example of the U.S. Climate/Environmental Policy. Bomb Baby Bomb. The U.S. Military is not content to be the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet. Fossil Fuels. The very thing that is hastening our march toward extinction. Nooooo, it must actually physically bomb, irradiate and destroy one of the most vitally important and ecologically sensitive regions on earth, 360% MORE than it has in the past at a critical time for wildlife upon which many people in the region depend on for survival. All in the name of being prepared for war over the toxic climate destroying resources to be yet to be plundered there. 2 Key cogs in the Military-Industrial Complex (“Defense” and Energy industries) are destroying whatever they deem necessary to meet their terminally short-sighted objectives. The madness continues unabated as Industrial Civilization grinds on.” -OSJ

By Dahr Jamail @ Truthout:

I lived in Anchorage for 10 years and spent much of that time climbing in and on the spine of the state, the Alaska Range. Three times I stood atop the mountain the Athabaskans call Denali, “the great one.” During that decade, I mountaineered for more than half a year on that magnificent state’s highest peaks.  It was there that I took in my own insignificance while living amid rock and ice, sleeping atop glaciers that creaked and moaned as they slowly ground their way toward lower elevations.

Alaska contains the largest coastal mountain range in the world and the highest peak in North America. It has more coastline than the entire contiguous 48 states combined and is big enough to hold the state of Texas two and a half times over. It has the largest population of bald eagles in the country. It has 430 kinds of birds along with the brown bear, the largest carnivorous land mammal in the world, and other species ranging from the pygmy shrew that weighs less than a penny to gray whales that come in at 45 tons. Species that are classified as “endangered” in other places are often found in abundance in Alaska.

Now, a dozen years after I left my home state and landed in Baghdad to begin life as a journalist and nine years after definitively abandoning Alaska, I find myself back. I wish it was to climb another mountain, but this time, unfortunately, it’s because I seem increasingly incapable of escaping the long and destructive reach of the US military.

That summer in 2003 when my life in Alaska ended was an unnerving one for me.  It followed a winter and spring in which I found myself protesting the coming invasion of Iraq in the streets of Anchorage, then impotently watching the televised spectacle of the Bush administration’s “shock and awe” assault on that country as Baghdad burned and Iraqis were slaughtered. While on Denali that summer I listened to news of the beginnings of what would be an occupation from hell and, in my tent on a glacier at 17 thousand feet, wondered what in the world I could do.

In this way, in a cloud of angst, I traveled to Iraq as an independent news team of one and found myself reporting on atrocities that were evident to anyone not embedded with the US military, which was then laying waste to the country. My early reporting, some of it for TomDispatch, warned of body counts on a trajectory toward one million, rampant torture in the military’s detention facilities, and the toxic legacy it had left in the city of Fallujah thanks to the use of depleted uranium munitions and white phosphorous.

As I learned, the US military is an industrial-scale killing machine and also the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet, which makes it a major source of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. As it happens, distant lands like Iraq sitting atop vast reservoirs of oil and natural gas are by no means its only playing fields.

Take the place where I now live, the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.  The US Navy already has plans to conduct electromagnetic warfare training in an area close to where I moved to once again seek solace in the mountains: Olympic National Forest and nearby Olympic National Park. And this June, it’s scheduling massive war games in the Gulf of Alaska, including live bombing runs that will mean the detonation of tens of thousands of pounds of toxic munitions, as well as the use of active sonar in the most pristine, economically valuable, and sustainable salmon fishery in the country (arguably in the world).  And all of this is to happen right in the middle of fishing season.

This time, in other words, the bombs will be falling far closer to home. Whether it’s war-torn Iraq or “peaceful” Alaska, Sunnis and Shi’ites or salmon and whales, to me the omnipresent “footprint” of the US military feels inescapable.

All of Southeast Alaska’s pristine coastline would be impacted by the Navy’s upcoming planned war games in the Gulf of Alaska. (Photo: Dahr Jamail/Truthout)

The War Comes Home

In 2013, US Navy researchers predicted ice-free summer Arctic waters by 2016 and it looks as if that prediction might come true. Recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that there was less ice in the Arctic this winter than in any other winter of the satellite era. Given that the Navy has been making plans for “ice-free” operations in the Arctic since at least 2001, their June “Northern Edge” exercises may well prove to be just the opening salvo in the future northern climate wars, with whales, seals, and salmon being the first in the line of fire.

In April 2001, a Navy symposium entitled “Naval Operations in an Ice-Free Arctic” was mounted to begin to prepare the service for a climate-change-induced future. Fast forward to June 2015. In what the military refers to as Alaska’s “premier” joint training exercise, Alaskan Command aims to conduct “Northern Edge” over 8,429 nautical miles, which include critical habitat for all five wild Alaskan salmon species and 377 other species of marine life. The upcoming war games in the Gulf of Alaska will not be the first such exercises in the region — they have been conducted, on and off, for the last 30 years — but they will be the largest by far. In fact, a 360 percent rise in munitions use is expected, according to Emily Stolarcyk, the program manager for the Eyak Preservation Council (EPC).

Eyak Preservation Council’s Emily Stolarcyk in Cordova, Alaska, with the Navy’s environmental impact statement for their planned war games in the Gulf of Alaska. (Photo: Dahr Jamail/Truthout)

The waters in the Gulf of Alaska are some of the most pristine in the world, rivaled only by those in the Antarctic, and among the purest and most nutrient-rich waters anywhere. Northern Edge will take place in an Alaskan “marine protected area,” as well as in a NOAA-designated “fisheries protected area.” These war games will also coincide with the key breeding and migratory periods of the marine life in the region as they make their way toward Prince William Sound, as well as further north into the Arctic.

Species affected will include blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer whales, the highly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there are only approximately 30 left), as well as dolphins and sea lions. No fewer than a dozen native tribes including the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan, Tlingit, Sun’aq, and Aleut rely on the area for subsistence living, not to speak of their cultural and spiritual identities.

The Navy is already permitted to use live ordnance including bombs, missiles, and torpedoes, along with active and passive sonar in “realistic” war gaming that is expected to involve the release of as much as 352,000 pounds of “expended materials” every year. (The Navy’s EIS lists numerous things as “expended materials,” including missiles, bombs, torpedoes.) At present, the Navy is well into the process of securing the necessary permits for the next five years and has even mentioned making plans for the next 20. Large numbers of warships and submarines are slated to move into the area and the potential pollution from this has worried Alaskans who live nearby.

“We are concerned about expended materials in addition to the bombs, jet noise, and sonar,” the Eyak Preservation Council’s Emily Stolarcyk tells me as we sit in her office in Cordova, Alaska.  EPC is an environmental and social-justice-oriented nonprofit whose primary mission is to protect wild salmon habitat. “Chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, ammonium perchlorate, the Navy’s own environmental impact statement says there is a high risk of chemical exposure to fish.”

Tiny Cordova, population 2,300, is home to the largest commercial fishing fleet in the state and consistently ranks among the top 10 busiest US fishing ports. Since September, when Stolarcyk first became aware of the Navy’s plans, she has been working tirelessly, calling local, state and federal officials and alerting virtually every fisherman she runs into about what she calls “the storm” looming on the horizon. “The propellants from the Navy’s missiles and some of their other weapons will release benzene, toluene, xylene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and naphthalene into the waters of twenty percent of the training area, according to their own EIS [environmental impact statement],” she explains as we look down on Cordova’s harbor with salmon fishing season rapidly approaching. As it happens, most of the chemicals she mentioned were part of BP’s disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which I covered for years, so as I listened to her I had an eerie sense of futuristic déjà vu.

Cordova, Alaska consistently ranks in the top-10 busiest US commercial fishing ports. (Photo: Dahr Jamail/Truthout)

Here’s just one example of the kinds of damage that will occur: the cyanide discharge from a Navy torpedo is in the range of 140-150 parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s “allowable” limit on cyanide: one part per billion.

The Navy’s EIS estimates that, in the five-year period in which these war games are to be conducted, there will be more than 182,000 “takes” — direct deaths of a marine mammal, or the disruption of essential behaviors like breeding, nursing, or surfacing.  On the deaths of fish, it offers no estimates at all.  Nevertheless, the Navy will be permitted to use at least 352,000 pounds of expended materials in these games annually. The potential negative effects could be far-reaching, given species migration and the global current system in northern waters.

In the meantime, the Navy is giving Stolarcyk’s efforts the cold shoulder, showing what she calls “total disregard toward the people making their living from these waters.” She adds, “They say this is for national security. They are theoretically defending us, but if they destroy our food source and how we make our living, while polluting our air and water, what’s left to defend?”

Stolarcyk has been labeled an “activist” and “environmentalist,” perhaps because the main organizations she’s managed to sign on to her efforts are indeed environmental groups like the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, and the Alaskans First Coalition.

“Why does wanting to protect wild salmon habitat make me an activist?” she asks. “How has that caused me to be branded as an environmentalist?” Given that the Alaska commercial fishing industry could be decimated if its iconic “wild-caught” salmon turn up with traces of cyanide or any of the myriad chemicals the Navy will be using, Stolarcyk could as easily be seen as fighting for the well-being, if not the survival, of the fishing industry in her state.

All of the Native Tribes and Villages of Kodiak, Alaska are opposed to the Navy’s planned war games in the Gulf of Alaska. (Photo: Dahr Jamail/Truthout)

War Gaming the Community

The clock is ticking in Cordova and others in Stolarcyk’s community are beginning to share her concerns. A few like Alexis Cooper, the executive director of Cordova District Fishermen United (CDFU), a non-profit organization that represents the commercial fishermen in the area, have begun to speak out. “We’re already seeing reduced numbers of halibut without the Navy having expanded their operations in the GOA [Gulf of Alaska],” she says, “and we’re already seeing other decreases in harvestable species.”

CDFU represents more than 800 commercial salmon fishermen, an industry that accounts for an estimated 90 percent of Cordova’s economy. Without salmon, like many other towns along coastal southeastern Alaska, it would effectively cease to exist.

Teal Webber, a lifelong commercial fisherwoman and member of the Native Village of Eyak, gets visibly upset when the Navy’s plans come up. “You wouldn’t bomb a bunch of farmland,” she says, “and the salmon run comes right through this area, so why are they doing this now?” She adds, “When all of the fishing community in Cordova gets the news about how much impact the Navy’s war games could have, you’ll see them oppose it en masse.”

Over 100 fishing vessels participated in a flotilla in Cordova, Alaska on May 16, in opposition to the Navy’s war games. (Photo: Chelsea Tracy Photography)

(Photo: Bob Martinson)

While I’m in town, Stolarcyk offers a public presentation of the case against Northern Edge in the elementary school auditorium.  As she shows a slide from the Navy’s environmental impact statement indicating that the areas affected will take decades to recover, several fishermen quietly shake their heads.

One of them, James Weiss, who also works for Alaska’s Fish and Game Department, pulls me aside and quietly says, “My son is growing up here, eating everything that comes out of the sea. I know fish travel through that area they plan to bomb and pollute, so of course I’m concerned. This is too important of a fishing area to put at risk.”

In the question-and-answer session that follows, Jim Kasch, the town’s mayor, assures Stolarcyk that he’ll ask the city council to become involved. “What’s disturbing is that there is no thought about the fish and marine life,” he tells me later. “It’s a sensitive area and we live off the ocean. This is just scary.” A Marine veteran, Kasch acknowledges the Navy’s need to train, then pauses and adds, “But dropping live ordnance in a sensitive fishery just isn’t a good idea. The entire coast of Alaska lives and breathes from our resources from the ocean.”

That evening, with the sun still high in the spring sky, I walk along the boat docks in the harbor and can’t help but wonder whether this small, scruffy town has a hope in hell of stopping or altering Northern Edge.  There have been examples of such unlikely victories in the past. A dozen years ago, the Navy was, for example, finally forced to stop using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as its own private bombing and test range, but only after having done so since the 1940s. In the wake of those six decades of target practice, the island’s population has the highest cancer and asthma rates in the Caribbean, a phenomenon locals attribute to the Navy’s activities.

Similarly, earlier this year a federal court ruled that Navy war games off the coast of California violated the law. It deemed an estimated 9.6 million “harms” to whales and dolphins via high-intensity sonar and underwater detonations improperly assessed as “negligible” in that service’s EIS.

As a result of Stolarcyk’s work, on May 6th Cordova’s city council passed a resolution formally opposing the upcoming war games. Unfortunately, the largest seafood processor in Cordova (and Alaska), Trident Seafoods, has yet to offer a comment on Northern Edge.  Its representatives wouldn’t even return my phone call on the subject.  Nor, for instance, has Cordova’s Prince William Sound Science Center, whose president, Katrina Hoffman, wrote me that “as an organization, we have no position statement on the matter at this time.”  This, despite their stated aim of supporting “the ability of communities in this region to maintain socioeconomic resilience among healthy, functioning ecosystems.” (Of course, it should be noted that at least some of their funds come from the Navy.)

Government-to-Government Consultation

At Kodiak Island, my next stop, I find a stronger sense of the threat on the horizon in both the fishing and tribal communities and palpable anger about the Navy’s plans. Take J.J. Marsh, the CEO of the Sun’aq Tribe, the largest on the island.  “I think it’s horrible,” she says the minute I sit down in her office. “I grew up here. I was raised on subsistence living. I grew up caring about the environment and the animals and fishing in a native household living off the land and seeing my grandpa being a fisherman. So obviously, the need to protect this is clear.”

What, I ask, is her tribe going to do?

She responds instantly. “We are going to file for a government-to-government consultation and so are other Kodiak tribes so that hopefully we can get this stopped.”

The US government has a unique relationship with Alaska’s Native tribes, like all other American Indian tribes.  It treats each as if it were an autonomous government.  If a tribe requests a “consultation,” Washington must respond and Marsh hopes that such an intervention might help block Northern Edge. “It’s about the generations to come. We have an opportunity as a sovereign tribe to go to battle on this with the feds. If we aren’t going to do it, who is?”

Melissa Borton, the tribal administrator for the Native Village of Afognak, feels similarly. Like Marsh’s tribe, hers was, until recently, remarkably unaware of the Navy’s plans.  That’s hardly surprising since that service has essentially made no effort to publicize what it is going to do. “We are absolutely going to be part of this [attempt to stop the Navy],” she tells me. “I’m appalled.”

One reason she’s appalled: she lived through Alaska’s monster Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.  “We are still feeling its effects,” she says. “Every time they make these environmental decisions they affect us… We are already plagued with cancer and it comes from the military waste already in our ground or that our fish and deer eat and we eat those… I’ve lost family to cancer, as most around here have and at some point in time this has to stop.”

When I meet with Natasha Hayden, an Afognak tribal council member whose husband is a commercial fisherman, she puts the matter simply and bluntly. “This is a frontal attack by the Navy on our cultural identity.”

Gary Knagin, lifelong fisherman and member of the Sun’aq tribe, is busily preparing his boat and crew for the salmon season when we talk. “We aren’t going to be able to eat if they do this. It’s bullshit. It’ll be detrimental to us and it’s obvious why. In June, when we are out there, salmon are jumping [in the waters] where they want to bomb as far as you can see in any direction. That’s the salmon run. So why do they have to do it in June? If our fish are contaminated, the whole state’s economy is hit. The fishing industry here supports everyone and every other business here is reliant upon the fishing industry. So if you take out the fishing, you take out the town.”

The Navy’s Free Ride

I requested comment from the US military’s Alaskan Command office, and Captain Anastasia Wasem responded after I returned home from my trip north. In our email exchange, I asked her why the Navy had chosen the Gulf of Alaska, given that it was a critical habitat for all five of the state’s wild salmon.  She replied that the waters where the war games will occur, which the Navy refers to as the Temporary Maritime Activities Area, are “strategically significant” and claimed that a recent “Pacific command study” found that naval training opportunities are declining everywhere in the Pacific “except Alaska,” which she referred to as “a true national asset.”

“The Navy’s training activities,” she added, “are conducted with an extensive set of mitigation measures designed to minimize the potential risk to marine life.”

In its assessment of the Navy’s plans, however, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), one of the premier federal agencies tasked with protecting national fisheries, disagreed. “Potential stressors to managed species and EFH [essential fish habitat],” its report said, “include vessel movements (disturbance and collisions), aircraft overflights (disturbance), fuel spills, ship discharge, explosive ordnance, sonar training (disturbance), weapons firing/nonexplosive ordnance use (disturbance and strikes), and expended materials (ordnance-related materials, targets, sonobuoys, and marine markers). Navy activities could have direct and indirect impacts on individual species, modify their habitat, or alter water quality.” According to the NMFS, effects on habitats and communities from Northern Edge “may result in damage that could take years to decades from which to recover.”

Captain Wasem assured me that the Navy made its plans in consultation with the NMFS, but she failed to add that those consultations were found to be inadequate by the agency or to acknowledge that it expressed serious concerns about the coming war games.  In fact, in 2011 it made four conservation recommendations to avoid, mitigate, or otherwise offset possible adverse effects to essential fish habitat. Although such recommendations were non-binding, the Navy was supposed to consider the public interest in its planning.

One of the recommendations, for instance, was that it develop a plan to report on fish mortality during the exercises. The Navy rejected this, claiming that such reporting would “not provide much, if any, valuable data.”  As Stolarcyk told me, “The Navy declined to do three of their four recommendations, and NMFS just rolled over.”

I asked Captain Wasem why the Navy choose to hold the exercise in the middle of salmon fishing season.

“The Northern Edge exercise is scheduled when weather is most conducive for training,” she explained vaguely, pointing out that “the Northern Edge exercise is a big investment for DoD [the Department of Defense] in terms of funding, use of equipment/fuels, strategic transportation, and personnel.”

Arctic Nightmares

The bottom line on all this is simple, if brutal. The Navy is increasingly focused on possible future climate-change conflicts in the melting waters of the north and, in that context, has little or no intention of caretaking the environment when it comes to military exercises. In addition, the federal agencies tasked with overseeing any war-gaming plans have neither the legal ability nor the will to enforce environmental regulations when what’s at stake, at least according to the Pentagon, is “national security.”

Needless to say, when it comes to the safety of locals in the Navy’s expanding area of operation, there is no obvious recourse. Alaskans can’t turn to NMFS or the Environmental Protection Agency or NOAA.  If you want to stop the US military from dropping live munitions, or blasting electromagnetic radiation into national forests and marine sanctuaries, or poisoning your environment, you’d better figure out how to file a major lawsuit or, if you belong to a Native tribe, demand a government-to-government consultation and hope it works. And both of those are long shots, at best.

Meanwhile, as the race heats up for reserves of oil and gas in the melting Arctic that shouldn’t be extracted and burned in the first place, so do the Navy’s war games.  From southern California to Alaska, if you live in a coastal town or city, odds are that the Navy is coming your way, if it’s not already there.

Nevertheless, Emily Stolarcyk shows no signs of throwing in the towel, despite the way the deck is stacked against her efforts. “It’s supposedly our constitutional right that control of the military is in the hands of the citizens,” she told me in our last session together.  At one point, she paused and asked, “Haven’t we learned from our past mistakes around not protecting salmon? Look at California, Oregon, and Washington’s salmon. They’ve been decimated. We have the best and most pristine salmon left on the planet, and the Navy wants to do these exercises. You can’t have both.”

Stolarcyk and I share a bond common among people who have lived in our northernmost state, a place whose wilderness is so vast and beautiful as to make your head spin. Those of us who have experienced its rivers and mountains, have been awed by the northern lights, and are regularly reminded of our own insignificance (even as we gained a new appreciation for how precious life really is) tend to want to protect the place as well as share it with others.

“Everyone has been telling me from the start that I’m fighting a lost cause and I will not win,” Stolarcyk said as our time together wound down. “No other non-profit in Alaska will touch this. But I actually believe we can fight this and we can stop them. I believe in the power of one. If I can convince someone to join me, it spreads from there. It takes a spark to start a fire, and I refuse to believe that nothing can be done.”

Three decades ago, in his book Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez suggested that, when it came to exploiting the Arctic versus living sustainably in it, the ecosystems of the region were too vulnerable to absorb attempts to “accommodate both sides.” In the years since, whether it’s been the Navy, Big Energy, or the increasingly catastrophic impacts of human-caused climate disruption, only one side has been accommodated and the results have been dismal.

In Iraq in wartime, I saw what the US military was capable of in a distant ravaged land. In June, I’ll see what that military is capable of in what still passes for peacetime and close to home indeed. As I sit at my desk writing this story on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the roar of Navy jets periodically rumbles in from across Puget Sound, where a massive naval air station is located. I can’t help but wonder whether, years from now, I’ll still be writing pieces with titles like “Destroying What Remains,” as the Navy continues its war-gaming in an ice-free summer Arctic amid a sea of offshore oil drilling platforms.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Dahr Jamail

Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last ten years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

His third book, The Mass Destruction of Iraq: Why It Is Happening, and Who Is Responsible, co-written with William Rivers Pitt, is available now on Amazon. He lives and works in Washington State.

On Memorial Day Good Americans Should Mourn First The Millions America Has Slaughtered In Their Names

Oldspeak: “Memorial Day has been hijacked, just as our nation has been hijacked, by the investment banks of the Military-Industrial-Complex. Its corporate owned media promotes and hails an indiscriminate celebration of all US wars as heroic. These Memorial Day festive celebrations have become a tradition of praising those of us who followed orders to kill designated enemies unquestioningly in more than a dozen nations since 1945 – and of military commanders, politicians and media anchors solemnly professing gratitude for the supreme sacrifice of those who died as a result.” –Jay Janson

“Another freethinking perspective from a veteran on Memorial Day. One need only observe the near constant exhortations to travel, consume, and celebrate to see how thouroughly contorted, comodified and militarized this originally solemn and sacred day remembering the fallen in the U.S. Civil War has become. The Iraq War was started based on lies. The Vietnam War was started based on lies, the War On Terror was started based on lies…. any number of  other U.S. started wars have been started under false pretenses. None was honorable. They were undertaken to protect the interests of elites and ideologues who have little interest in freedom, liberty and justice for all, but quite a lot in maximizing profits for shareholders. Idealistic, patriotic and brave men were lied to, broken, built up again, programmed to kill enemies of the state without question. The slaughter has been global and the true extent of which largely unknown to most Americans. On this Memorial Day, trade in your barbeques, parties and brews for mourning, contemplation and protest. There is nothing to celebrate about war. Carnage and misery are what are remembered by most of its victims.  We should remember them as well.”

By Jay Janson @ Dissident Voice:

This veteran is waiting for the year in which the Veterans For Peace, in its Memorial Day Press Release, states that Veterans mourn first, the lives America took in poor countries, both the civilian men, women and children and the patriots that fought our illegal and criminal invasions since 1945. Only then should come bitterly mourning GIs who were duped by our elected officials and the CIA and Pentagon fed, corporate-controlled war-promoting media cartel fooling them with lies, misinformation, disinformation and psyop techniques that deceived them into proudly following homicidal criminal orders, for which they are obviously liable for prosecution. Orders given, as Martin Luther King Jr. cried out, “for atrocity wars and covert homicide meant to maintain unjust predatory investments overseas.”¹

Your writer’s four buddies from basic training, whose corpses are somewhere in North Korea, would have wanted this kind of a press release. They were normal guys, still kids really. We thought going into the army was just something everyone had to do. They would have been pissed off to see cruelly ignorant Americans praising them on Memorial Day for their sacrifice. Jesus knows they did not want to die for any reason, let alone while killing others for lies. They loved waking up in the morning, loved children, all children, cute Korean children, especially. They were asking themselves, why are we killing Koreans in their own country?

If these four young men knew what I know now, whew! If they could rise up, they would surely be going after those high ranking military with lots of colorful ribbons on their smart uniforms, surrounded by flags and glorifying the US war in Korea and in all the dozens of countries since.

Damn! In 1945, the US Army landed in a Korea that America had recognized as Japanese territory since 1905 and during a forty year brutal occupation, in return for Japan’s acceptance of the US claim to own the Philippines and other islands in Asian waters.² State Department officials quickly shut down the democratic all-Korea government the Japanese commanding general had allowed Koreans to form, once Japan was defeated. Knowing this Korean government would not be pro-US, they set up in its place, a US Army military government; cut the nation in two and installed a brutal Korean from Washington as President. His special services and secret police would account for massacres totaling up to nearly 200,000 men, women, and their children in the years before the army of North Korea invaded and united the peninsula in five short weeks as the army of the Southern dictator defected or went home. These massacres of communists, socialists, unionists, and people that did not accept the US partition of their country and kept secret by American media have now been fully document by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the South Korean Congress.³ The US has recently officially apologized for its own massacres of civilians in the South.

North Korea today is the most militarized nation on the planet because it was leveled twice by merciless bombing, threatened with atom bombs, and for sixty-three years has suffered US-arranged international sanctions meant to cripple it, and a continual campaign of slanderous attack in US media and never ending threats from Washington, while twice a year, great war game exercises go on so near its coast that the booms of US naval ships’ cannon and missiles are clearly heard in its capital city. Last month saw the largest naval live-fire exercise in history, reportedly with North Korean flags painted on targets. What else could be the explanation of its leader threatening to hit the US with the few nuclear weapons it has, knowing the America that menaces it has 20,000, and the most powerful armed force in the history of the world. But we have seen ‘the crazy North Korean leader story’ on prime time for a month. Last year right after US-South Korean war games, a South Korea warship was blown in two, probably by a US mine, but what is believed all over the Western media dominated world is that was an old North Korean torpedo. Who knows or cares that the Chinese, the Russian Navy and a Japanese investigation found the accusation not credible, that the US and its UN Secretary General stooge refused to consider a North Korea request for a UN investigation of what it was accused of.⁴ No, the torpedo story was featured for weeks to justify tighter that ever sanctions and stronger threats than before, and Libya was a frightening example of what may be awaiting it.

If the media features for nine months, weaponized pick-up trucks run by tough looking hombres as peaceful demonstrators against the government of oil wealthy Libya, a nation with a living standard higher than nine European countries, it becomes ‘truth,’ and the liberator of what was the poorest country in Africa, and leader of African Unity against continuing European exploitation, winds up with a blade up his backside, after being cornered by British and French warplanes. No matter the president of Italy told media, “Gadaffi is loved by his people.”

Not until US world hegemony is overthrown, will ordinary people come to know that almost one million Libyans, out of a total country population of six, were desperately demonstrating for their government and leader outside Tripoli as British and French high tech war planes were finishing off their nation’s army.⁵

Note to US media personalities: Among the generals who were imprisoned or hung after trail at Nuremberg, were five media celebrities.

There are either similar absurd media concocted stories, or no story at all, that excuse US crimes against humanity in the dozens of nations US designated local bad guys have been mass murdered to help a little country out, and protect the American way of life in the US. America is so good to invade and bomb and overthrow violently governments all for the benefit of nearly a billion people.

Greece, Korea, Guatemala, Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Lebanon, Cuba, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Serbia/Kosovo, Bosnia, Libya; the list of countries covertly attacked and government overthrown is longer and contains almost every nation in Latin America, many times over if crimes against peace Nuremberg Principle VI are included.

Note that remember, invading little countries was nothing new for the US before World War II – Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Philippines, China, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and more.

Again, this veteran is hoping that the Veterans For Peace Memorial Day Statement Press Release will say that VFP, or at least many if not all VFP, mourn the patriots of US invaded countries that fell fighting against overwhelming odds, and their civilian countrymen and children who also fell in harms way of those US invading forces. To be polite, we mourn them first before mourning our own soldiers who were killed in the line of duty following our government’s criminal orders. Otherwise how can anyone believe VFP condemns the taking of all these millions of lives of poor people overseas in illegal criminal military action; an illegal use of military that Representative from Texas, Congressman and Republican candidate for president, denounced (but did not call for prosecution).

Nothing less than this can possibly dent the usual Memorial Day adulation for dying for what Martin Luther King called “atrocity wars for maintaining unjust predatory investments on three continents.”

Here is what this veteran would have Veterans For Peace to say to Americans on Memorial Day:

Dear Fellow Americans,

No Americans knows more about US Wars than your veterans, who fought alongside buddies who did not make it home alive and will be mourned throughout the nation this weekend.

This Memorial Day 2012, Veterans For Peace is asking their fellow Americans to morn quietly at home. We ask that all sincerely patriotic citizens not take part in military parades and festive open-air observances under flags flying military colors. It anyone asks you why, say you don’t like selective mourning, that is, mourning our dead but not those our soldiers killed.

Memorial Day has been hijacked, just as our nation has been hijacked, by the investment banks of the Military-Industrial-Complex. Its corporate owned media promotes and hails an indiscriminate celebration of all US wars as heroic.

These Memorial Day festive celebrations have become a tradition of praising those of us who followed orders to kill designated enemies unquestioningly in more than a dozen nations since 1945 – and of military commanders, politicians and media anchors solemnly professing gratitude for the supreme sacrifice of those who died as a result.

We, your fellow Americans, who were trained to kill, and later fell in love with the dear people of the countries we were sent to kill, strongly suggest, for the protection of your children, that you tune out network news coverage of Memorial Day.

Corporate owned commercial media, with an unrelenting agenda of deceitful war propaganda has taken the lives of many of your loved ones, luring them into serving a shameful use of military power, while your sons and daughters, in all good faith, sought only to serve their country.

These wars were undeclared and illegal and resulted in the terrible deaths of millions of fellow human beings in their own small and beloved countries – often as not, dying in their very own homes. Last year one of the three present candidates for president firmly denounced these wars as having been illegal, unconstitutional, criminal and a monstrous disaster for America.

Veterans For Peace endorses the Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-Condemened-US-Wars-for-Predatory-Investments-International-Awareness-Campaign. Most members believe Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead because he would have awakened public responsibility and our capability to make such illegal wars unacceptable and inoperable through non-participation, non-support and conscientious objection. That would have crippled investor profits. King is mourned as a victim of US wars for profit.

Rev. King, was dangerous for the elite investing community that rules the 99% of us. He condemned all US wars and clandestinely organized violence “all around the world “created to maintain “unfair predatory overseas investments.” King had the charisma to have prosecuted successfully what he called atrocity wars and crimes against humanity in the street and in the court of public opinion as he prosecuted successfully racist crimes against humanity at home.

Veterans condemn the Militarization of Memorial Day that originally was a sacred day of mourning the civil war that took loved ones of both sides who once passed to the afterlife are reunited in brotherhood.

Veterans For Peace sincerely wishes everyone a peaceful, loving and contemplative Memorial Day.

The above was a draft submitted to Veterans For Peace upon the request of last year’s Veterans For Peace President, but not published.

Members of the Memorial Day Press Release Drafting Committee should realize, if not worrisome, that there are very few people who believe that Veterans For Peace will bring these wars to an end or intends to do so, even though, logically, those who willing did the killing are the Americans who should most be able to lead their being made unacceptable and eventually inoperable.

Leadership of its largest chapters have even opposed the national office statement of support for the impeachment proposal presented by Rep. Dennis Kucinich and others in the House of Representatives. At the same time former VFP president Elliot Adams was in court after indicting President Obama everyone following his criminal orders at the US Air Force Drone base at Hancock, New York.

I am absolutely convinced eventually a renegade faction of Veterans For Peace will constitute itself, and on a future Memorial Day, publish a Memorial Day press release of its own along going further, and calling for the prosecution of not only the government, but war investors, war promoters in media and clergy and the war crimes committed by military personnel.⁶
Prosecute our own before our victims unite and prosecute all of us.

1. See Beyond Vietnam: a Time to Break Silence sermon. [↩]
2. See Diplomacy That Will Live in Infamy, New York Times, James Bradley, 12/5/2009. See also the Taft-Katsura Agreement. [↩]
3. Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [↩]
4. See Independent Media as Mouthpiece for Centers of Power, Dissident Voice. [↩]
5. See One million libyans marching in tripoli in support of gaddafi “million march” or search for many articles and videos. [↩]
6. See Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now. [↩]

Jay Janson, spent eight years as Assistant Conductor of the Vietnam Symphony Orchestra in Hanoi and also toured, including with Dan Tai-son, who practiced in a Hanoi bomb shelter. The orchestra was founded by Ho Chi Minh,and it plays most of its concerts in the Opera House, a diminutive copy of the Paris Opera. In 1945, our ally Ho, from a balcony overlooking the large square and flanked by an American Major and a British Colonel, declared Vietnam independent. Everyone in the orchestra lost family, “killed by the Americans” they would mention simply, with Buddhist un-accusing acceptance. Jay can be reached at: tdmedia2000@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Jay.

The Secret History Of The War Over Oil In Iraq: The Real Reason For The Iraq War

Oldspeak: “Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits. And that’s how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about “blood for oil”, but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward. And they’ve succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels.” Behold! Grand Area Doctrine par excellence. “Military intervention at will…  it declared that the US has the right to use military force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” and must maintain huge military forces “forward deployed” in Europe and Asia “in order to shape people’s opinions about us” and “to shape events that will affect our livelihood and our security.” –Noam Chomsky. When you see the full length and breadth of the depraved and anti-human logic profit-hungry corporocrats concoct to serve their anti-democratic ends, all you can do is shake your head and sigh. Why? Why were over 100,ooo poor, working and middle class Americans killed and maimed? Why have 1,ooo,ooo Iraqi men women and children been killed, with untold numbers on of Americans & Iraqis poisoned and permanently disfigured via the rain of depleted uranium bullets and shells rained on Iraq? Artificially imposed scarcity to generate exorbitant profits, or in a word: Greed. They believe wholeheartedly in the immortal words of Gordon Gekko “Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA” They see the world as a “college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business“. They see the USA as a failing corporation, and they’re looting it before it goes bankrupt. Buying and selling everything that isn’t nailed down, including people. We the people are not really people in their eyes. We’re employees. Unsecured creditors. Revenue streams. All expendable, as evidenced by the breathtaking misadventures in Iraq. The ironic thing is this diabolical plan and illegal war, will help the planet as whole. 10 million less barrels of oil have been burned. The profits accumulated and trillions of dollars wasted are artificial. The real costs in lives and resources have been unacceptably and unnecessarily high. If things remain as they are, conditions will deteriorate. These resource wars will become more more frequent, when there isn’t enough to go around.  Sadly this secret history will not become public, I don’t expect corporate media to pick up on what this intrepid journalist has reported. The official stories and counter-stories have been inculcated. War crimes will continue to go unpunished. Could we expect anything else from a civilization that organizes itself around entities like  sociopathic multinational energy corporations?

By Greg Palast @ Vice Magazine:

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, “confidential”.

Because it was marked “confidential” on each page, the oil industry stooge couldn’t believe the US State Department had given me a complete copy of their secret plans for the oil fields of Iraq.

Actually, the State Department had done no such thing. But my line of bullshit had been so well-practiced and the set-up on my mark had so thoroughly established my fake identity, that I almost began to believe my own lies.

I closed in. I said I wanted to make sure she and I were working from the same State Department draft. Could she tell me the official name, date and number of pages? She did.

Bingo! I’d just beaten the Military-Petroleum Complex in a lying contest, so I had a right to be chuffed.

After phoning numbers from California to Kazakhstan to trick my mark, my next calls were to the State Department and Pentagon. Now that I had the specs on the scheme for Iraq’s oil – that State and Defense Department swore, in writing, did not exist – I told them I’d appreciate their handing over a copy (no expurgations, please) or there would be a very embarrassing story on BBC Newsnight.

Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq’s oil crafted by George Bush’s State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas.

I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.

Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil.

But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than “Blood for Oil”. Much, much worse.

The key was in the flow chart on page 15, Iraq Oil Regime Timeline & Scenario Analysis:

“…A single state-owned company …enhances a government’s relationship with OPEC.”

An infographic produced by the author presenting the Iraq war’s secret history. Click to enlarge.

Let me explain why these words rocked my casbah.

I’d already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, “especially the oil”.

That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan’s authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It’s hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.)

The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq’s oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.

General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired Garner, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger’s firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq’s assets – “especially the oil”.

But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields.

How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.

(One unwitting source was industry oil-trading maven Edward Morse of Lehman/Credit Suisse, who threatened to sue Harper’s Magazine for my quoting him. Morse denied I ever spoke with him. But when I played the tape from my hidden recorder, his memory cleared and he scampered away.)

There was no way in hell that Baker’s clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq’s oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million bbd of Iraqi oil and thereby knock the price of oil back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.

The author.

Big Oil could not allow Iraq’s oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel’s quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq’s oil fields.

That’s right: The oil companies didn’t want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell didn’t want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq.

Saddam wasn’t trying to stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq’s sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas.

The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq’s oil. He told Bremer, “There will be no privatisation of oil – END OF STATEMENT.” Carroll then passed off control of Iraq’s oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney’s old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker “enhance OPEC” option anchored in state ownership.

Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, “production sharing agreements”.

And that’s how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about “blood for oil”, but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward.

Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits.

And they’ve succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels.

The result: As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion this month, we also mark the fifth year of crude at $100 a barrel.

As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

Chomsky: Why America & Israel Are The Greatest Threats To Peace

Oldspeak:””It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation should arm itself with nuclear weapons, which inspires other nations to do so.” -General Lee Butler. Imagine if Iran — or any other country — did a fraction of what America & Israel do at will. “It would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.) –“Which Path To Persia?”, Brookings Institution, 2009

By Noam Chomsky @ AlterNet:

It is not easy to escape from one’s skin, to see the world differently from the way it is presented to us day after day. But it is useful to try. Let’s take a few examples.

The war drums are beating ever more loudly over Iran. Imagine the situation to be reversed.

Iran is carrying out a murderous and destructive low-level war against Israel with great-power participation. Its leaders announce that negotiations are going nowhere. Israel refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow inspections, as Iran has done. Israel continues to defy the overwhelming international call for a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region. Throughout, Iran enjoys the support of its superpower patron.

Iranian leaders are therefore announcing their intention to bomb Israel, and prominent Iranian military analysts report that the attack may happen before the U.S. elections.

Iran can use its powerful air force and new submarines sent by Germany, armed with nuclear missiles and stationed off the coast of Israel. Whatever the timetable, Iran is counting on its superpower backer to join if not lead the assault. U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta says that while we do not favor such an attack, as a sovereign country Iran will act in its best interests.

All unimaginable, of course, though it is actually happening, with the cast of characters reversed. True, analogies are never exact, and this one is unfair — to Iran.

Like its patron, Israel resorts to violence at will. It persists in illegal settlement in occupied territory, some annexed, all in brazen defiance of international law and the U.N. Security Council. It has repeatedly carried out brutal attacks against Lebanon and the imprisoned people of Gaza, killing tens of thousands without credible pretext.

Thirty years ago Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor, an act that has recently been praised, avoiding the strong evidence, even from U.S. intelligence, that the bombing did not end Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program but rather initiated it. Bombing of Iran might have the same effect.

Iran too has carried out aggression — but during the past several hundred years, only under the U.S.-backed regime of the shah, when it conquered Arab islands in the Persian Gulf.

Iran engaged in nuclear development programs under the shah, with the strong support of official Washington. The Iranian government is brutal and repressive, as are Washington’s allies in the region. The most important ally, Saudi Arabia, is the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime, and spends enormous funds spreading its radical Wahhabist doctrines elsewhere. The gulf dictatorships, also favored U.S. allies, have harshly repressed any popular effort to join the Arab Spring.

The Nonaligned Movement — the governments of most of the world’s population — is now meeting in Teheran. The group has vigorously endorsed Iran’s right to enrich uranium, and some members — India, for example — adhere to the harsh U.S. sanctions program only partially and reluctantly.

The NAM delegates doubtless recognize the threat that dominates discussion in the West, lucidly articulated by Gen. Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command: “It is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East,” one nation should arm itself with nuclear weapons, which “inspires other nations to do so.”

Butler is not referring to Iran, but to Israel, which is regarded in the Arab countries and in Europe as posing the greatest threat to peace In the Arab world, the United States is ranked second as a threat, while Iran, though disliked, is far less feared. Indeed in many polls majorities hold that the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons to balance the threats they perceive.

If Iran is indeed moving toward nuclear-weapons capability — this is still unknown to U.S. intelligence — that may be because it is “inspired to do so” by the U.S.-Israeli threats, regularly issued in explicit violation of the U.N. Charter.

Why then is Iran the greatest threat to world peace, as seen in official Western discourse? The primary reason is acknowledged by U.S. military and intelligence and their Israeli counterparts: Iran might deter the resort to force by the United States and Israel.

Furthermore Iran must be punished for its “successful defiance,” which was Washington’s charge against Cuba half a century ago, and still the driving force for the U.S. assault against Cuba that continues despite international condemnation.

Other events featured on the front pages might also benefit from a different perspective. Suppose that Julian Assange had leaked Russian documents revealing important information that Moscow wanted to conceal from the public, and that circumstances were otherwise identical.

Sweden would not hesitate to pursue its sole announced concern, accepting the offer to interrogate Assange in London. It would declare that if Assange returned to Sweden (as he has agreed to do), he would not be extradited to Russia, where chances of a fair trial would be slight.

Sweden would be honored for this principled stand. Assange would be praised for performing a public service — which, of course, would not obviate the need to take the accusations against him as seriously as in all such cases.

The most prominent news story of the day here is the U.S. election. An appropriate perspective was provided by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who held that “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”

Guided by that insight, coverage of the election should focus on the impact of wealth on policy, extensively analyzed in the recent study “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America” by Martin Gilens. He found that the vast majority are “powerless to shape government policy” when their preferences diverge from the affluent, who pretty much get what they want when it matters to them.

Small wonder, then, that in a recent ranking of the 31 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of social justice, the United States placed 27th, despite its extraordinary advantages.

Or that rational treatment of issues tends to evaporate in the electoral campaign, in ways sometimes verging on comedy.

To take one case, Paul Krugman reports that the much-admired Big Thinker of the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, declares that he derives his ideas about the financial system from a character in a fantasy novel — “Atlas Shrugged” — who calls for the use of gold coins instead of paper currency.

It only remains to draw from a really distinguished writer, Jonathan Swift. In “Gulliver’s Travels,” his sages of Lagado carry all their goods with them in packs on their backs, and thus could use them for barter without the encumbrance of gold. Then the economy and democracy could truly flourish — and best of all, inequality would sharply decline, a gift to the spirit of Justice Brandeis.

 

Obama Speeds Up Preparations For Air Strikes, No-Fly Zone, As U.S., Russia Split War-Torn Syria Into Spheres Of Influence

Oldspeak:“War #7 is imminent.  “US President Barack Obama has ordered the US Navy and Air Force to accelerate preparations for a limited air offensive against the Assad regime and the imposition of no-fly zones over Syria” The script is remarkably similar to the one used in Libya & Iraq.  Insert U.S. backed, foreign-born “revolutionaries” and clandestinely funnel financial and military support to native dissident militant groups to instigate a civil war with the regime to be changed. Play up alleged atrocities committed by the regime in media, to provide pretext for the coming invasion/coup de etat. Play up condemnations of the dictator to be removed by the “international community”. After invasion, insert military dictatorship/puppet regime obedient to U.S. interests. Divvy up “reconstruction” and resource extraction contracts among American/European corporations. Appropriation complete. The Russians held out giving their blessing long enough to ensure they’d retain control over at least a portion of their client state.”

Related Video:

Obama accelerates preparations for limited air strike, no-fly zones in Syria

Related Story:

U.S. Secretly Backed Syrian Opposition Groups, Wikileaks Cables Show

The Truth Behind The Coming “Regime Change” In Syria

 

By DebkaFile:

US President Barack Obama has ordered the US Navy and Air Force to accelerate preparations for a limited air offensive against the Assad regime and the imposition of no-fly zones over Syria, debkafile reports. Their mission will be to knock out Assad’s central regime and military command centers so as to shake regime stability and restrict Syrian army and air force activity for subduing rebel action and wreaking violence on civilian populations.

Debkafile’s sources disclose that the US President decided on this step after hearing Russian officials stating repeatedly that “Moscow would support the departure of President Bashar al-Assad if Syrians agreed to it.”  This position was interpreted as opening up two paths of action:

1.  To go for Assad’s removal by stepping up arms supplies to the rebels and organizing their forces as a professional force able to take on the military units loyal to Assad. This process was already in evidence Friday, June 8, when for the first time a Syrian Free Army (which numbers some 600 men under arms) attacked a Syrian army battalion in Damascus. One of its targets was a bus carrying Russian specialists.

2.  To select a group of high army officers who, under the pressure of the limited air offensive, would be ready to ease Assad out of power or stage a military coup to force him and his family to accept exile.

The US operation would be modulated according to the way political and military events unfolded.
Washington is not sure how Moscow would react aside from sharp condemnations or whether Russia would accept a process of regime change in Damascus and its replacement by military rule.

Syria is being further wrenched apart as a result of US President Barack Obama’s maneuverings for winning Russian cooperation in resolving the Syrian conflict for US concessions in the nuclear controversy with Iran: As the coming DEBKA-Net-Weekly out Friday reveals, Russia is cementing its grip on Syria’s Mediterranean coast while pushing its civil war-torn heartland over to the Americans.

To spoil the Russian game, the US hopes to draw Damascus into the Syrian revolt, a goal only achievable with air force aid.

US Accelerates Preparations For ‘no-fly zone’ In Syria

By RT:

The United States may soon take on a formal role in the Syrian uprising after reports surfaced this week that suggest the White House wants an air offensive targeting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

After over a year of unrest in Syria, Israel’s Debka news agency reports that US President Barack Obama has asked the US Navy and Air Force to accelerate plans that would aid in the ousting of Assad. According to their sources, President Obama hopes that by initiating a temporary air strike in locales instrumental to the Syrian government, the US may be able to decimate Assad’s control by attacking his regime’s military command centers.

The US would call for a no-fly zone over Syria, reports Debka, then send their own personnel to strike Assad-aligned targets.

Murmurings of the latest plans out of Washington come less than two weeks after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) called for the implementation of a no-fly zone. Speaking to reporters last month, Sen. Graham said that ousting Assad from control in Syria is much more crucial for America’s interests than the issue of Libya; last year the US aided in the removal of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi from Libyan rule.

“Compared to Libya, the strategic upside of taking out (Syrian President Bashar) Assad is far greater,” said Graham, who currently sits on the US Senate Committee of Armed Services. “We’ve used force to stop slaughter less strategic and egregious than this.”

Debka’s reports also come days after White House Press Secretary Jay Carney confirmed that, in terms of US involvement in Syria,“military action is always an option,” although he added, “We do not believe that … further militarization of the situation in Syria at this point is the right course of action.” Less than two weeks later, however, the White House may have already changed their stance.

According to Debka, Washington’s rumored change of heart may have something to do with reports out of Russia. Sources speaking with the news agency say that US President Obama asked for an accelerated attack on Syria’s leaders after hearing Russian officials allegedly say, “Moscow would support the departure of President Bashar al-Assad if Syrians agreed to it.”

Debka adds that, to carry out the plan, the US will equip Syrian rebels with military supplies so that they could out attack Assad’s regime on the ground after an American-led airstrikes. It is believed that Assad’s government is currently using unmanned surveillance air drones to patrol the countryside for rebel forces only to then order strikes targeted them.

 

 

 

Barack Obama Signs Pact With Hamid Karzai To Keep U.S. Troops In Afghanistan Through 2024

Oldspeak:”I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”  Candidate Barack Obama, October 27, 2007 Welp. So much for ending the war in Afghanistan. Keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan virtually guarantees this war will continue until 2024.  The Taliban has no interest in negotiating peace while  American troops are in Afghanistan. I’m sure this development will make the Military Industrial Complex very happy. No comment on the 1,000 of mercenaries and private army soldiers there too.  Or the TAPI Pipeline that needs to be protected.  Yet another campaign promise, broken. This resource war trumps that promise. This is the nature of a Unitary Executive. Making “surprise trip” to a war zone to Sign a war pact that affect us all with no input from constituents, or their “representatives” in Congress.  I have no words.”

By Ben Farmer @ The U.K. Telegraph:

The agreement would allow not only military trainers to stay to build up the Afghan army and police, but also American special forces soldiers and air power to remain.

The prospect of such a deal has already been met with anger among Afghanistan’s neighbours including, publicly, Iran and, privately, Pakistan.

It also risks being rejected by the Taliban and derailing any attempt to coax them to the negotiating table, according to one senior member of Hamid Karzai’s peace council.

A withdrawal of American troops has already begun following an agreement to hand over security for the country to Kabul by the end of 2014.

But Afghans wary of being abandoned are keen to lock America into a longer partnership after the deadline. Many analysts also believe the American military would like to retain a presence close to Pakistan, Iran and China.

Both Afghan and American officials said that they hoped to sign the pact before the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in December. Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai agreed last week to escalate the negotiations and their national security advisers will meet in Washington in September.

Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Mr Karzai’s top security adviser, told The Daily Telegraph that “remarkable progress” had been made. US officials have said they would be disappointed if a deal could not be reached by December and that the majority of small print had been agreed.

Dr Spanta said a longer-term presence was crucial not only to build Afghan forces, but also to fight terrorism.

“If [the Americans] provide us weapons and equipment, they need facilities to bring that equipment,” he said. “If they train our police and soldiers, then those trainers will not be 10 or 20, they will be thousands.

“We know we will be confronted with international terrorists. 2014, is not the end of international terrorist networks and we have a common commitment to fight them. For this purpose also, the US needs facilities.”

Afghan forces would still need support from US fighter aircraft and helicopters, he predicted. In the past, Washington officials have estimated a total of 25,000 troops may be needed.

Dr Spanta added: “In the Afghan proposal we are talking about 10 years from 2014, but this is under discussion.” America would not be granted its own bases, and would be a guest on Afghan bases, he said. Pakistan and Iran were also deeply opposed to the deal.

Andrey Avetisyan, Russian ambassador to Kabul, said: “Afghanistan needs many other things apart from the permanent military presence of some countries. It needs economic help and it needs peace. Military bases are not a tool for peace.

“I don’t understand why such bases are needed. If the job is done, if terrorism is defeated and peace and stability is brought back, then why would you need bases?

“If the job is not done, then several thousand troops, even special forces, will not be able to do the job that 150,000 troops couldn’t do. It is not possible.”

A complete withdrawal of foreign troops has been a precondition for any Taliban negotiations with Mr Karzai’s government and the deal would wreck the currently distant prospect of a negotiated peace, Mr Avetisyan said.

Abdul Hakim Mujahid, deputy leader of the peace council set up by Mr Karzai to seek a settlement, said he suspected the Taliban had intensified their insurgency in response to the prospect of the pact. “They want to put pressure on the world community and Afghan government,” he said

The Truth Behind The Coming “Regime Change” In Syria

 Oldspeak:” Just as was done ahead of the Invasion of Libya. ‘The U.S. seems to be arming small paramilitary groups loyal to U.S. interests in Syria. This strategy of using a proxy army to undermine an anti-U.S. government has a grisly past. Coincidentally, ‘U.S. media and government are fanatically giving the impression that, in Syria, the native population would like foreign militarily intervention to overthrow their authoritarian president, Bashar Assad.  But facts are stubborn things.’ –Shamus Cooke. It’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the U.S. is using the same script used for Libya, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and numerous other candidates for “regime change”, right in line with its plans of invading 7 countries in 5 years. We already know thanks to wikileaks that the U.S. has secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, so it seems everything is going according to plan. When will the American people let their govt know they have no desire to support the insatiable warmongering lust for expansion of american empire that will only benefit a few oligarchs? “War Is Peace” “Ignorance Is Strength”

Related Stories:

Ten days after 9/11 the U.S. government had already decided to attack Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan & Iran.

Syrian opposition accuses UN of ‘moment of shame’ over resolution

By Shamus Cooke @ Veracity Voice:

After meeting again to decide Syria’s fate, the Arab League again decided to extend its “monitoring mission” in Syria. However, some Arab League nations under U.S. diplomatic control are clamoring for blood. These countries — virtual sock puppets of U.S. foreign policy — want to declare the Arab League monitoring mission “a failure,” so that military intervention — in the form of a no fly zone — can be used for regime change.

The United States appears to be using a strategy in Syria that it has perfected over the years, having succeeded most recently in Libya: arming small paramilitary groups loyal to U.S. interests that claim to speak for the native population; these militants then attack the targeted government the U.S. would like to see overthrown —including terrorist bombings — and when the attacked government defends itself, the U.S. cries “genocide” or “mass murder,” while calling for foreign military intervention.

This is the strategy that the U.S. is using to channel the Arab Spring into the bloody dead end of foreign military intervention.

For example, the U.S. media and government are fanatically giving the impression that, in Syria, the native population would like foreign militarily intervention to overthrow their authoritarian president, Bashar Assad.  But facts are stubborn things.

After spinning these lies, The New York Times was forced to admit, in several articles, that there have been massive rallies in Syria in support of the Syrian government. These rallies are larger than any pro-government demonstration that the U.S. government could hope to organize for itself. The New York Times reports:

“The turnout [at least tens of thousands — see picture in link] in Sabaa Bahrat Square in Damascus, the [Syrian] capital, once again underlined the degree of backing that Mr. Assad and his leadership still enjoy among many Syrians, nearly seven months into the popular uprising. That support is especially pronounced in cities like Damascus and Aleppo, the country’s two largest.” (January 13, 2012).

The New York Times is forced to admit that the two largest cities — in a small country — support the government (or at least oppose foreign military intervention).

This was further confirmed by a poll funded by the anti-Syrian Qatar Foundation, preformed by the Doha Debates:

“According to the latest opinion poll commissioned by The Doha Debates, Syrians are more supportive of their president with 55% not wanting him to resign.” (January 2, 2012).

If people in Syria do not want foreign intervention — a likely reason that so many attended pro-Assad demonstrations — what about the so-called Free Syrian Army, which the United States has given immense credibility to and which claims to speak for the Syrian people?

The Free Syrian Army — like its Libyan counterpart — appears to be yet another Made-in-the-USA militant group, by route of its ally Turkey, a fact alluded to by the pro U.S.-establishment magazine, Foreign Affairs:

“Why does the Syrian [government] military not rocket their [Free Syrian Army] position or launch a large-scale assault? The FSA fighters are positioned about a mile from the Turkish border, near enough to escape across if the situation turned dire.”

The article also quotes a Free Syrian Army member who states: “Every [Free Syrian Army] group in Turkey has its own job,” Sayeed said. “[The Turks] gave us our freedom to move.” (December 8, 2011).

The article also mentions that the Free Syrian Army is calling for a “no fly zone” over certain regions of Syria, which would destroy the Syrian government military; the possible starting locations of this no fly zone are on the Syrian borders of either Turkey, Jordan, or Iraq — all three are either strong U.S. allies or client states.

A “no fly zone” is the new euphemism that means the U.S. and its European military junior partners in NATO will intervene to use their advanced fighter jets to destroy the Syrian military, as happened in Libya. In Libya the no fly zone evolved into a “no drive zone” and eventually a “no survival” zone for anything resembling the Libyan military — or anybody who armed himself in defense of the Libyan government.

As in Syria, Libya’s largest city, Tripoli, never had large anti-government demonstrations. The anti-Libyan government/pro-U.S. paramilitary group that attacked Libyan forces was so tiny that it took months to take power after 10,000 NATO bombing sorties (bombing missions) that destroyed large portions of Libya’s infrastructure, as documented by the independent Human Rights Investigations.

It’s totally unimaginable that any large section of Syrian society would invite a NATO-backed no fly zone, i.e. war, into Syria. The examples of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are too glaring for any Middle Eastern nation not to notice. For the Free Syrian Army to demand a NATO invasion of Syria is enough to label the FSA a U.S. puppet group striving for political power, deserving to be condemned.

This strategy of using a proxy army to undermine an anti-U.S. government has a grisly past. This strategy is celebrated in the book Charlie Wilson’s War, which tells the true story of the U.S. government sending weapons and cash to Islamic extremists to wage a terrorist campaign against the Afghan government, which was an ally of the Soviet Union at the time. The attacks eventually led to the Afghan government asking for Soviet military re-enforcements, whose presence in Afghanistan created a degree of popular support for the extremists who eventually became known as the Taliban.

The same scenario also played itself out in Kosovo, where the tiny, U.S.-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began a terrorist campaign against the government of Yugoslavia, intending to separate Kosovo into an independent nation. When the Yugoslav government attempted to defend itself from the KLA — while imitating its violent tactics — the U.S. and other western governments labeled it genocide, and invaded Yugoslavia, calling it a “humanitarian invasion.”  To this day the U.S. is one of few nations that recognizes Kosovo as an independent nation while Kosovo faithfully serves the interests of the United States.

The same proxy war strategy — by the U.S. and other European powers — played a crucial role in numerous wars throughout Africa, which culminated in the massive Congo War that killed over five million people, as French journalist Gerard Prunier describes in his book, Africa’s World War.

In Syria history is repeating itself, and some non-U.S. allies are very aware of it. The New York Times reports:

“[Russia’s Foreign Minister] said that foreign governments [the U.S., Turkey, etc.] were arming ‘militants and extremists’ in Syria.”The Foreign minister also gave an accurate description of U.S. foreign policy towards Iran:

“Mr. Lavrov offered a similarly grave message about the possibility of a military strike against Iran, which he said would be a “catastrophe.” He said sanctions now being proposed against Tehran were “intended to have a smothering effect on the Iranian economy and the Iranian population, probably in the hopes of provoking discontent.” (January 19, 2012).

Most ominously, the Russian Foreign Minister said that U.S. foreign policy in Syria and Iran could lead to a “very big war,” i.e., a war that becomes regional or even international in scope, as other powers intervene to uphold their interests in the region.

Russia has offered a way to avoid war in Syria and is pursuing it through the UN Security Council; it is the same path being pursued by the pro-U.S. government in Yemen: maintaining the current government in power until elections are called. Unfortunately, Yemen is an ally of the U.S. and Syria is not — the U.S. and its allies are blocking the same approach in Syria in order to pursue war.

The Syrian government opposition bloc inside of Syria, the National Coordination Committee, opposes foreign military intervention. A leader of the NCC is Hassan Abdul Azim, who wisely states;

“We refuse on principle any type of military foreign intervention because it threatens the freedom of our country,” (January 19, 2012).

This is very likely the prevailing opinion inside of Syria, since the threat of no fly zones will result in the same mass bombings experienced by the citizens of Tripoli in Libya. The fake Syrian opposition outside of the country, The Syrian National Council, is yet another U.S. puppet — now allied with the Free Syrian Army —begging for a military invasion of Syria in order to “liberate” it.  Of course the western media tells only the perspective of the pro-U.S. Syrian National Council.

The U.S. has proven on multiple occasions that military solutions solve nothing, having torn asunder the social fabric of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya. The working people of Syria and Iran do not desire “help” from the U.S. government and its allies to prevent bloodshed. The working people of these countries could liberate themselves from their authoritarian governments, as did the Tunisians and Egyptians, which is precisely the point: the U.S. is intervening militarily to re-gain control over a region that slipped out of its hands during the Arab Spring. This military approach serves to push the working people of the targeted country into the hands of their government while creating a humanitarian catastrophe for the invaded nation. The working people of the United States have no interest in aggressive war and have a responsibility to learn about U.S. government propaganda so that they can demand its end in the streets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/world/middleeast/syrians-rally-in-support-of-assad.html
http://www.thedohadebates.com/news/item/index.asp?n=14312
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/12/08/syria_free_army_rebels?page=0,3
http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/tag/nato-bombing/
http://www.smh.com.au/world/russia-warns-west-it-risks-war-over-syria-iran-20120119-1q8ei.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/world/europe/russia-warns-against-support-for-arab-uprisings.html?_r=3&ref=world
http://rt.com/news/syria-protests-russia-dialogue-149/

Shamus Cooke is a regular columnist for Veracity Voice

He can be reached at shamuscook@yahoo.com

Scramble For Africa: Redux – Has Obama Just Kicked Off Another Oil War In Africa? This Time In Uganda?

Oldspeak:” ‘African oil is of national strategic interest to us, and it will increase and become more important as we go forward.’ – Walter Kantsteiner III,  Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, 2002. On this Veterans Day 2011, Meditate on the fact that our Nobel Peace Prize winning President has initiated another barely reported military incursion into another oil rich region of Africa. Allying our troops with another murderous dictator who tortures and kills his own citizens, unscrupulous oil and natural gas corporations and private military corporations to protect oil production/exploration efforts. Once again being explained as a “humanitarian mission” with the supposed purpose of’ stopping human rights abuses and ‘furthering U.S. national security interests and foreign policy’. Never mind that this effort is all part of the new “Great Game“, of keeping oil away from China, and securing it for U.S. use.  ‘One of the rationales Obama gave for sending JSOC troops to Uganda, was that the LRA recruits and uses child soldiers’. Nevermind the unabated recruitment of child soldiers throughout the horn of africa who’ll likely be armed with U.S weapons as result of Obama’s repeatedly waiving restrictions on military aid to ‘Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)–four countries with records of actively recruiting child soldiers…Any country even remotely close to the horn of Africa (like these distinguished four) is just too strategically important…So, for the time being, it’s still guns for the kids’ –Mother Jones. Nevermind the hypocrisy of partnering with maniacal dictators in Uganda, Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, but hunting and killing others in Iraq and Libya. In light of recent events, that guy should be very afraid. It’s clear that when the U.S. no longer has use for you, you are very quickly cut loose, labeled a terrorist who kills and tortures your own people, and done away with exercising extreme prejudice. And the people of Uganda should be very afraid. When the U.S. deploys its military in your country, you can bet dollars to doughnuts, innocents will die at their hands. “Profit Is Paramount”.

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The West Goes To War For Oil And Power In Libya

By Steve Horn @ Alter Net: 

On Friday, October 14, President Barack Obama announced he would be sending 100 Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) forces to Uganda to “remove from the battlefield” (meaning capture or kill) the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony. “I believe that deploying these U.S. Armed Forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa,” wrote Obama in a letter to U.S. House Majority Leader, John Boehner, R-OH.

The LRA, whose horrific deeds have been have been well-documented by scores of human rights reports and the documentary film, Invisible Children, can best be described as a Christian cult militia engaged in violent armed rebellion against the Ugandan government, located primarily in northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan. An arrest warrant was issued in 2005 by the International Criminal Court against the LRA leadership for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Kony, the LRA ringleader, possibly has over 80 wives (i.e. sex slaves), according to a 2009 story by the Guardian, and has fathered over 40 children.

It gets worse.

According to a May 2009 article in Newsweek, “[H]e and the hundreds of forcibly conscripted children who serve as his killing squads are feared throughout the region for their horrific levels of brutality and the butchery of tens of thousands of defenseless civilians. Their swath of destruction has displaced well over 2 million people. Kony has forced new male recruits to rape their mothers and kill their parents. Former LRA members say the rebels sometimes cook and eat their victims.”

The mainstream media, at least those who have covered this new U.S. military adventure, have taken the Obama administration at face value on its stated claim that JSOC troops are necessary in Uganda and neighboring countries, for the purpose of murdering the elusive and brutal war criminal-at-large, Joseph Kony.

But is this the true motive for sending JSOC troops into the region? A probe into the last several years of geopolitical posturing in Africa by the United States reveals another tale. It is the tale of a 21st century “scramble for Africa” for the procurement of oil, using imperial tools, such as drones, mercenaries and military bases, in a desperate effort to gain control of this valuable commodity.

An African Scramble for Oil

In October 2008, AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command, became the U.S. military’s sixth regional Unified Combatant Command center, joining those already housed in South America (SOUTHCOM), North America (NORTHCOM), Europe (EUCOM), the Middle East (CENTCOM), and the Pacific (USPACOM). The Unified Combatant Command centers serve as regional strategic hubs for the U.S. military planners to plot and implement the ways in which the U.S. will dominate these various regions for whatever it might deem to be in line with the national interest or national security purposes.

AFRICOM, though, did not come out of the blue and was years in the making before its realization. Not long after 9/11, in early January 2002, a key symposium titled “African Oil: A Priority for U.S. National Security and African Development” took place in Washington, DC; it was hosted by the neoconservative think-tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).

IASPS is most famous for its authorship of a paper called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” a 1996 paper that, among other things, called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, foreshadowing the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the neoconservative-lead Bush administration foreign policy team.

At the symposium, then Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kantsteiner III, stated, “African oil is a national strategic interest…[and] it’s people like you who will…bring the oil home.”

Later, in May 2004, Kantsteiner chaired a congressionally funded Africa Policy Advisory Panel report titled, “Rising U.S. States in Africa,” in which he stated, “African oil is of national strategic interest to us, and it will increase and become more important as we go forward.”

In the midst of these summits, the U.S. set up crucial military bases — in spring 2003 in Djibouti, a base called Camp Lemmonier, and in 2004 at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda.

The U.S. was now firmly implanted in the region to begin an African safari, featuring, most prominently, tours of prospective and already existing oil rigs and pipelines spanning every contour of the continent.

Oil Safari to Uganda

Not long after AFRICOM became a reality, multinational corporations also flocked into Uganda to search for oil.

The search was a flaming success story, with 2.5 billion barrels of oil now having been discovered, but still to this date, not yet procured. The royalties accompanying the oil’s usage could reach up to $2 billion a year by 2015, reported the Economist in May 2010.

This oil is located off of Lake Albert in northwest Uganda, a lake shared by both Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Multinational corporations are required to sign something known as a Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) with the Ugandan government in order to drill for Uganda’s oil. In essence, a PSA is a contractual agreement between a foreign corporation benefiting from a country’s resources and the government of a country whose resources are being benefited from.

In October 2006, according to a WikiLeaks cable, Tullow Oil, a British company, and Heritage Oil, a Canadian company, signed a PSA with the Ugandan government, led by President Yoweri Musveni. This particular PSA, though, was no ordinary one, and indeed, could serve, in part, as an explanation for the logic of Obama’s October 14 announcement.

For the first three years the PSA was signed, the details were kept secret from everyone but upper-level Tullow and Heritage executives and Museveni’s inner circle. A February 2010 report written by PLATFORM, a British nonprofit organization, titled, “Contracts Curse: Uganda’s oil agreements place profit before people,” explains the PSA best and for the first time, made public its content.

The PSA, PLATFORM explained, “contain[s] no clauses covering security provision[s]…There is no public agreement setting out the relationship between the oil companies and the military or police forces. Thus it is unclear what promises and guarantees the Ugandan government has made to ensure security and what rights the oil companies have been awarded.”

This raised numerous vital questions for PLATFORM, including, “Do oil company security or private military contractors have the right or authority to arrest, injure or kill those they perceive as a threat?” and “Is the Ugandan government incentivised to prioritise security interests over the human rights of local populations?”

That same report also included revelations by PLATFORM that the Ugandan government had constructed a “new military base on ten square miles” near Lake Albert, where the oil was located. The report also disclosed that Museveni had created something called an Oil Wells Protection Unit (OWPU), which amounted to his own security forces, or mercenaries, guarding oil rigs.

Concerned about the OWPU, PLATFORM wrote, “Apparently its mandate is ‘to provide physical security for the oil and gas industry’ and ‘conduct strategic intelligence activities in all areas where oil will be processed and marketed.’ However, the OWPU has no Web site and no clearly known structure or chain of command…In this context, the OWPU could easily be misused to repress opposition to oil extraction activities, further political gains by the government and commit human rights abuses without accountability.”

Enter Heritage Oil and Ties to Private Mercenary Armies

Possibly the most crucial fact about the undisclosed clauses concerning security provisions in the PSA, was this vital detail: The Canadian oil company Heritage, which is owned by Tony Buckingham, who many credit for being the first innovator behind the modern-day private military corporation (PMC) (think Blackwater USA, now known as Xe Services), was formerly the main stakeholder in the Albertine Basin.

In 2010, Heritage sold its stake in the project to the British company Tullow Oil for $1.5 billion. Though Heritage is no longer exploring for oil in the hopes of drilling for it in Uganda, Buckingham’s background and business connections are still crucial to grasp.

Buckingham is a former officer of the British Special Air Service (SAS) — a parallel to the U.S. JSOC forces sent into Uganda by Obama — according to a 1997 story. In 1992 Buckingham became the founder and CEO of Heritage Oil. A year later, in 1993, Buckingham founded a PMC called Executive Outcomes (EO). EO officially closed shop in 1998, but during its time of existence, it consistently followed in the footsteps of the locations that Buckingham took Heritage’s oil rigs. And Buckingham’s close ties to mercenary armies did not terminate with EO’s fall. Instead, he formed a special relationship with a key figure, the half-brother of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, Salim Saleh.

The special relationship between Saleh and Buckingham also goes a long way toward explaining the Obama decision to invade Uganda.

Salim Saleh, Erik Prince, and Guns-For-Hire in the Horn of Africa

Upon the eclipse of EO in 1998, rather than decay into oblivion, it instead morphed into a multi-tentacled machine of various PMC split-offs, the most crucial of which, at least as far as Uganda is concerned, is Saracen International.

Salim Saleh owns a 25-percent stake in Saracen. “[Saracen International] was formed with the remnants of Executive Outcomes, a private mercenary firm composed largely of former South African special operations troops who worked throughout Africa in the 1990s,” explained the New York Times in a January 2011 article.

Saleh, now Museveni’s military adviser, is a former high-ranking official for theUganda People’s Defence Force, the military of the Ugandan government. He is also a well-connected mercenary, as seen through his ownership stake in Saracen.

Saracen, in turns out, also maintains an important relationship with Blackwater USA founder and CEO, Erik Prince.

The same article that revealed the ties between EO and Saracen International also revealed that Prince possesses an ownership stake in Saracen. The Times wrote, “According to a Jan. 12 confidential report by the African Union, Mr. Prince ‘is at the top of the management chain of Saracen and provided seed money for the Saracen contract.'”

Blackwater, under Prince’s leadership, has been involved in the game of guns-for-hire in the Horn of Africa since February 2009, according to a WikiLeaks cable. The cable reveals that Blackwater won a contract to operate an armed ship, called McArthur, from a port in Djibouti, the country which is also home of the U.S. military’s Camp Lemonnier base.

The cable also reveals that McArthur “will have an unarmed UAV” (Unarmed Vehicle, aka a drone), “will likely engage…Kenya in the future,” and that Blackwater “has briefed AFRICOM, CENTCOM, and Embassy Nairobi officials.” In other words, this means the Prince and Blackwater mission had the blessing of top-level U.S. military and diplomatic officials.

Could Prince’s and Saleh’s guns-for-hire be teaming up with JSOC forces in the Albertine basin to guard oil rigs? History provides some highly relavant precedent.

Erik Prince, Blackwater USA and Oil: History Repeating Itself?

Prince’s Blackwater has been involved in such engagements before. Rewind to Azerbaijan and Iraq, where Blackwater was tasked with guarding crucial oil pipelines and oil wells for the world’s wealthiest oil and natural gas corporations.

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, in his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, revealed that “Blackwater USA was hired by the Pentagon…to deploy in Azerbaijan, where Blackwater would be tasked with establishing and training an elite…force modeled after the U.S. Navy SEALs that would ultimately protect the interests of the United States and its allies in a hostile region.

“Blackwater joined a U.S. corporate landscape [in the region] that included…corporations such as Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron-Texaco, Unocal and ExxonMobil … Instead of sending in battalions of active U.S. military to Azerbaijan, the Pentagon deployed…Blackwater…that would serve a dual purpose: protecting the West’s new profitable oil and gas exploitation in a region historically dominated by Russia and Iran, and possibly laying the groundwork for an important forward operating base for an attack against Iran,” Scahill continued.

Azerbaijan, like Uganda, is home to a vast array of oil and natural gas, and also a key pipeline, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which, after reaching its respective coastal homes in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, ends up on the global export market.

In Iraq, as revealed by the Guardian in a March 2004 article, Blackwater, via a Pentagon contract, recruited Chilean “commandos, other soldiers and seamen, paying them up to $4,000 a month to guard oil wells against attack by insurgents…many of [them] had trained under the military government of Augusto Pinochet.” Pinochet, many will recall, was the brutal dictator who came to power after the CIA-initiated 1973 coup of Salvador Allende.

Iraq, like Uganda and Azerbaijan, is home to vast amounts of oil. Major syndicates ranging from BP America, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips have all flocked to Iraq in the mad dash for Iraq’s resources since the 2003 onset of the ongoing U.S. occupation of Iraq.

WikiLeaks Cables Reveal Ugandan Oil Bid Corruption

ExxonMobil, teaming up with Tullow Oil, as seen through the lens of important Wikileaks State Department diplomatic cables, has also shown great interest in the economic opportunities surrounding oil exploration off of Lake Albert, as well as great concern over governmental corruption in the nascent Ugandan oil industry.

A key December 3, 2009 cable, titled, “Uganda: Corruption Allegations Accompany Arrival Of Major Oil Firms,” reads, “Executives from ExxonMobil visited Uganda on November 18-19, and met with Ambassador (Jerry) Lanier (the U.S. ambassador to Uganda), Mission Officers, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development (MEMD), Uganda’s Petroleum Exploration and Production Department (PEPD), and Tullow (Oil)…ExxonMobil representatives who traveled to Kampala said they were ‘very impressed’ with…the Ugandan government oil representatives…”

Roughly a month later, yet another important WikiLeaks-provided State Department diplomatic cable was produced on January 13, 2010, titled, “Uganda: Security Report Details Oil Sector Corruption,” which discusses the impacts rampant corruption unfolding in the Ugandan oil industry would have on the U.S. if the ExxonMobil deal falls through.

“A corrupt…agreement would undermine a potential multi-billion dollar deal between ExxonMobil and Tullow, and have serious long-term implications for U.S….in Uganda in terms of…economic development,” the cable reads.

The State Department’s diplomatic cables make it quite clear that ExxonMobil and its partner, Tullow Oil, were both deeply interested in the Ugandan oil industry, but also gravely concerned about corruption.

Yet, Tullow and ExxonMobil had little to worry about, based on both Prince’s ExxonMobil ties during his days at Blackwater USA, as well as a crucial March 2008 meeting between the Salim Saleh-led Ugandan military and high-level Tullow Oil officials, as exposed by Wikileaks.

Tullow’s Mercenary Presence Long in the Making at Lake Albert Basin

Tullow, as revealed by State Department diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks, has been building up a mercenary army presence in the Lake Albert area for over three years.

A March 2008 State Department diplomatic cable reads, “…Tullow Oil, one of the four exploration companies operating in western Uganda, said that as the oil activity on Lake Albert increased, a security presence would be vital.”

The cable also mentions that U.S. Ambassador to Uganda Steven Browning and Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa Rear Admiral Phillip Greene “met with representatives from Tullow Oil and the Ugandan People’s Defense Force (UPDF), as well as local leaders…on March 4.” The UPDF is lead by Salim Saleh, who also owns a 25-percent ownership stake in Saracen International, the private mercenary army also owned in part by Erik Prince.

During the meeting it was also “noted that oil exploration and production would raise the profile of the area, which could lead to increased incidences of violence between Ugandan locals and security forces…” and the meeting concluded with a request for “an assessment team…to provide the Ugandan military with an organizational, doctrinal, training, and equipment needs assessment for a future lake security force.”

Toss into the ring the ongoing great power politics rivalry between the U.S. and China, and things become even more complex.

Great Power Politics Posturing in the Works?

Though ExxonMobil and Tullow Oil lost out on the corrupt oil bid in late 2009, while exploration has been done, drilling has yet to occur in Uganda. In that vein, 100 U.S. JSOC troops, likely teaming up with Erik Prince, Salim Saleh and Yoweri Museveni-backed mercenaries, have swooped into the Lake Albert area to secure the prize, oil, before its rival does.

The opponent? China.

On October 24, Tullow sold $2.9 billion worth of its shares of oil to France’s Total Oil and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), though it has yet to be approved by the Museveni government and requires his approval.

Throughout all of this, it is vital to bear in mind the bigger picture, which is that the United States and China have been competing against one another in the new “African Scramble” for Africa’s valuable oil resources.

Serge Michel and Michel Beuret, in their 2009 book China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa, write, “China’s advances in Africa’s oil-rich regions have been viewed with concern bordering on paranoia in the United States….[It] could…deteriorate into a a head-to-head clash between China and the United States, prompting the kind of open conflict that some see as inevitable by 2030.”

One has to wonder what will happen with regards to this recent oil deal, knowing the players involved, and seeing the geopolitical and resources maneuvering taking place in the Lake Albert region.

If the United States and its well-connected guns-for-hire have any say, Tullow Oil, Heritage Oil, ExxonMobil will take home all the royalties, and CNOOC will be sent home packing.

Another Piece of the Puzzle: Senate Bill 1067 of 2009

It appears that since the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, Senate Bill 1067, a bill that called for, among other things, to “apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield…and to disarm and demobilize the remaining Lord’s Resistance Army fighters,” the United States has Lake Albert targeted in its crosshairs.

An important provision squeezed into the bill was a section mandating that an official strategy be written up to “disarm and demobilize” the LRA.

“Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the President shall develop and submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a strategy to guide future United States support across the region,” the bill reads. “The strategy shall include…a description of how this engagement will fit within the context of broader efforts and policy objectives in the Great Lakes Region.”

The Great Lakes Region includes Lake Albert and “broader efforts and policy objectives” translates into, based on State Department diplomatic cables and public statements made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the control of precious oil resources in the Albertine Basin.

Signed into law by Obama in May 2009, it is crucial to put when the bill was written into proper historical context.

As revealed by State Department diplomatic cables, this was roughly a year after the special meeting between Tullow Oil representatives; U.S. Ambassador to Uganda, Steven Browning; and then head of the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, Rear Admiral Phillip Greene near Lake Albert. It was also roughly half a year after the launch of AFRICOM.

Some may have been surprised by this latest announcement to invade another country by the Obama administration, but based on recent history, there are no real surprises here. Still, despite evidence that seems to fly in the face of the reason offered by Obama to send troops to Uganda, it is still worth scrutinizing his rationale.

Humanitarian Intervention for Kony?

If there is one thing that is nearly for certain, it is that the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony, as awful as they are, likely have nothing to do with this most recent U.S. military engagement in Uganda.

In the end, it all comes back to oil, even if top-level U.S. officials maintain that this has “nothing to do with oil.”

For one, days before this incursion, it was announced that the “the Obama administration quietly waived restrictions on military aid to Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)–four countries with records of actively recruiting child soldiers…Any country even remotely close to the horn of Africa (like these distinguished four) is just too strategically important…So, for the time being, it’s still guns for the kids,” wrote Mother Jones.

One of the rationales Obama gave for sending JSOC troops to Uganda, was that the LRA recruits and uses child soldiers, which, given this recent decision, made for the second consecutive year, is certainly not something high on the list of Obama’s concerns.

Furthermore, if human rights were actually the chief concern, why did the United States show interest in Kony only after the discovery of oil in the region? Not only that, but Kony, as many have made clear, is nowhere to be found in Uganda and is on the run or in hiding somewhere outside of the country.

To top it all off, Yoweri Museveni and his brother, the gun-for-hire Salim Saleh, both have deplorable human rights records, and unlike the LRA, maintain state control over the people of Uganda. An article titled “Uganda’s Tyrant,” written in 2007 by the Guardian, sums up the human rights situation under Museveni:

“President Museveni’s…regime is a constitutional dictatorship, with a rubber stamp parliament, powerless judiciary, censored media and heavily militarised civil institutions…Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International…confirm the harassment of Museveni’s political opponents, detention without trial, torture, extrajudicial killings, suppression of protests and homophobic witch-hunts.”

Abhorrent as his human rights record may be, the United States sent a $45 million military aid package to the Museveni-lead government in July 2011, which included four drones.

Do not be surprised if, months from now, ExxonMobil or another U.S. oil industry superpower walks away with drilling rights in the Lake Albert region and CNOOC, the current main possessor of Uganda’s Lake Albert oil resources, is sent packing.

Also don’t be surprised if Erik Prince and Salim Saleh lead Saracen International, working alongside JSOC troops, who work closely with the Central Intelligence Agency, are working as “security forces” off of the Albertine oil basin.

These are not only likely scenarios, but probable ones. Joseph Kony and his LRA allies might be taken down, but the people of Uganda, on the whole, will not benefit from this “humanitarian intervention.”

Things, unfortunately, will probably only worsen for the people of Uganda as time progresses.

Steve Horn is a researcher and writer for DeSmogBlog. He lives in Madison, WI.

Details Of Secret Pact Emerge: Obama Administration Negotiating To Keep U.S. Troops In Afghanistan Until 2024

Oldspeak: Welp. So much for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. “America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.” –Major General Smedley Darlington Butler; Congressional Medal of Honor Winner. Today America is in more wars than at any point in its history. There appears to be no end in sight. Spiritual death is upon us. Physical death soon come.”

By Ben Farmer @ The U.K. Telegraph:

Maybe you thought we’d get out of Afghanistan this very year, the drawdown date President Obama set as he surged U.S. troops into the country in December 2009; or maybe you thought the Obama administration’s target for withdrawal might be the last day of 2014, that date certain of recent vintage for turning over U.S. and NATO combat duties to the Afghans; or maybe — if you happen to be a news jockey — you took note when Brigadier General Walter Givhan suggested that the Afghan air force he was training might finally be up and running in 2016; or when his successor Brigadier General Michael  Boera suggested that the date might slip to 2018 if Congress insisted that the Pentagon buy American, not Russian, helicopters for its pilots.  Or maybe you noticed when Lieutenant General William Caldwell, commander of NATO Training Mission Afghanistan, recently suggested that the Afghan military would need the support of thousands of foreign trainers until at least 2020.

Whatever you thought, it turns out that you were wrong, and it’s time to recalibrate.  After all, according to Ben Farmer of the British Telegraph, the Obama administration is now negotiating a “pact” with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai that could leave American military “trainers” — thousands of them — as well as special operations forces, and the U.S. Air Force settled into some of the enormous Afghan bases the Pentagon has built there until… 2024.

Let’s try, as a start, to put 2024 in perspective.

It was 1979 — and I was 35 — when the U.S. embarked on its first Afghan war.  If 2024 is truly the Afghan endpoint for Washington, I’ll be 80 when the last American soldier leaves.

Or think of it another way: this September’s kindergarteners will be high school graduates in 2024 (and so eligible to join the all-volunteer army in the utterly unlikely event that victory hasn’t been achieved by then).

Or thought of another way, Mullah Omar, head of the Taliban, born in 1959, will 65 and ready for retirement in 2024; George W. Bush, the president who launched the war against the Taliban in 2001, will be 78; Barack Obama, the president who made Bush’s Afghan war his own, will be 63; and David Petraeus, the general who ran the Iraq War, Centcom, the Afghan War, and then the CIA, will be 72. (Expect years of Afghan-war-related memoirs.)  And NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, may be only a year from losing power in 2024 and perhaps less than 73,600 years from the nearest star (by which time, the U.S. will be out of Afghanistan).

But let’s not get downhearted. If Farmer’s 2024 date turns out to be accurate, based on what we’ve repeatedly seen over the last near decade, there’s plenty to look forward to in the intervening 13 years — and here’s just a sampling:

The U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (call it the IG), government task forces, and various media organizations can do periodic investigations and issue corruption reports for 13 more years, just like the one Task Force 2010, set up by General Petraeus, recently issued. It indicated that some $360 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars have “ended up in the hands of… the Taliban, criminals, and power brokers with ties to both,” all thanks to “profiteering, bribery, and extortion.”

And here’s something else to look forward to: If all goes well, the U.S. and its allies can continue to offer another 13 years’ worth of military and “development” funding that, as a June report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff indicated, already accounts for 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. And as that report (and so many others before it) also made clear, that funding has a remarkable way of “developing” next to nothing.

Or look forward to years more of reports like the one issued in April by the IG pointing out that some of the $10 billion a year being poured into training, building up, and supplying Afghanistan’s police is simply missing-in-action. Gone. Nowhere in sight. Not accounted for. The IG reported that “the country’s police rolls and payrolls cannot be verified because of poor record keeping,” which meant that the numbers “for all practical purposes become somewhat fictitious.” In other words, you can expect 13 more years in which your tax dollars fund significant numbers of “ghost policemen.”

Or look forward to more than a decade of news articles and official reports on the approximately 30 percent of Afghan army troops who desert each year. (Lieutenant General Caldwell supplied that figure in June.) To be exact, if enrolment in the army reaches 171,600 by this October, as scheduled, you’re talking about slightly more than 51,000 deserters a year, or a minimum of 668,000 by 2024 (and since army troop levels are slated to rise, however absurd that number already sounds, it’s undoubtedly an underestimate).

Or consider the cost of the war as reflected in the Pentagon’s 2012 budget request:$107.3 billion a year. (Of course, like those police figures, that’s probably a kind of happy fiction.) A group of experts on the Afghan war, for example, puts the actual number at $120 billion — and neither of these figures includes the money that Washington will be spending in 2024 and beyond to care for the war’s damaged veterans. Still, just for argument’s sake, let’s go with $107 billion a year through 2014, when the last U.S. “combat” troops are slated to depart, and then just arbitrarily slash that figure by half to 2024. That would total $856 billion over the next 13 years.  (By comparison, were President Obama’s proposals to close corporate tax loopholes and tax the mega-rich at Clinton-era rates put into effect, that would pull in only $700 billion over 10 years.)

And of course, while a rollicking good time would be had by all over those 13 years of training local forces and carrying out special operations and air missions in the greater Afghan region, a newly released report from the Medicare and Social Security Trustees predicts that “the Hospital Insurance fund, which pays for hospital stays of Medicare recipients, will run out in 2024, five years earlier than last year’s report estimate.” And don’t even think about what’s likely to happen to America’s infrastructure, already sorely underfunded — all those dams, bridges, natural gas pipelines, roads, and other basics of our lives — in those same years.

I could go on, but you get the idea. If by dint of sheer grit and tons of dough, the Pentagon somehow outlasts the Taliban (and whatever is left of al-Qaeda in the region), victory in Afghanistan in 2024 will assumedly leave in place a desperately frail semi-nation with a still-hemorrhaging security force of 400,000 that it will be utterly incapable of paying for.

In the meantime, the U.S. will undoubtedly be a nation unbuilt. Still, what a 13 years to look forward to!

So mark it on your calendars. If that Washington-Kabul pact goes through as planned, consider it settled: victory in 2024 and mission accomplished.