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POPSThe Savagery of a Surge That Failed He didn't scream. Instead, the sight induced a sort of catatonia; he picked up the head, cradled it in his arms, and started walking aimlessly. He carried on like this for days, until tribal elders pried the head from his hands and convinced him to deal with his loss more constructively. He decided he would get revenge by becoming a suicide bomber and inflicting a loss on some American family as painful as the one he had just suffered. The Taliban are as uninterested in social services and human rights as the Karzai government or the international forces, but they know how to turn a world of poverty, insecurity, and death from laser-guided missiles to their advantage. Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war - close to $36 billion a year - but only five cents of every dollar goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, "a staggering 40% has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and salaries".
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POPSAfghanistan Conflict Rapidly Worsening What a mess. Nato troops given new mandate to attack heroin drug barons in Afghanistan NATO accused of sheltering Afghan heroin trade Karzai's brother denies links to drug trade Nato happy to ignore explosion in Afghan opium output, says Russia
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POPSMoscow calls for anti-U.S. alliance While Russia has insisted it was not intending to supplant NATO, Mr Medvedev made it clear that the US-dominated alliance was partly responsible for the war in the Caucasus by its failure to rein in Georgian "aggression". This is the result of the U.S. throwing its weight around the world for far too long. It is human nature that if one person is constantly directing policy onto everyone else then that person is going to be knocked down for being perceived as a bully. The time has come for the U.S. to relax its role as self appointed world police and let other nations handle their own affairs or we will be “uninvited to the party”. Hopefully, future U.S. presidents will bury this old school ‘might is right’ mentality that Bush/Cheney revitalized when they took office.
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POPSA Better Strategy on Opium in Afghanistan The statistics are bleak and we are pursuing typically myopic policies in Afghanistan. Hitchens (whose writing I think is superb) makes a great case for a different approach. "in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don't have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.)"
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POPSWhy CIA Veterans are Scared of McCain McCain is influenced by a circle of hardline Republican legislators and congressional staff as well as disgruntled former Agency officials "who all had these long-standing grudges against people in the Agency," the former senior intelligence officer said. "They think the CIA is a hotbed of liberals. Right-wing, nutty paranoia stuff. They all love the military and hate the CIA. Because the CIA tells them stuff they don't want to hear."
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POPSMcCain's Foreign Policy: Global Democratic Gang McCain calls for a "League of Democracies" for the purposes of "peace" but actually for war. Its key principle is "entangling alliances" which George Washington warned against, starting with NATO as its foundation. This is actually an old plan and precisely what the UN is all about except it cuts China and Russia out. This is consistent with George Bush (Bush 41) "new world order" speech where he talked about a United Nations that lives up to the intention of its founders, as he launched Iraq War I. GWB 43 has also made reference to similar principles while already by-passing the UN when it is reluctant to launch a war. Actually it makes little difference, except to show that Russia and China will be cut out of decisions because they will be the new targets of contest under his neocon vision. The call to "make the world safe for democracy" (like Wilson and FDR) has been the foundation of world wars, and likely more.
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POPS"Top 25 Censored stories for 2009" # # 21 NATO Considers "First Strike" Nuclear Option # # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid # # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs # # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror # # 25 Bush's Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/category/y-2009/
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POPSGroup Claims Responsibility for Paki Marriott Bombing Interesting, while Pakistan blames Al Qaeda this "little known" group emerges (from Dubai) and takes responsibility. Interestingly they disclose what the MSM thus far has not: had targeted 250 U.S. Marines and NATO officials which he said had been at the hotel
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POPSThree major points from Russian-Georgian war
The West appears to have underestimated the strength of the Kremlin’s negative reaction toward NATO’s eastward expansion. Russia’s reluctant acquiescence to the Baltic states’ joining the Atlantic alliance was clearly misleading: Moscow did make some noise, but it was in no position to take any active measures of resistance, as Russia back then was still relatively weak. For the Kremlin, the establishment of a NATO foothold in Georgia would be an intolerable development that could spark a domino effect across the Caucasus. It would start with the internationalization of peace process in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, causing Russia to lose its monopoly on "peacekeeping" operations, and culminate with Moscow losing control over the South Caucasus - with the grave consequences for stability in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus autonomous republics. To prevent this from happening, the Kremlin "preempted" the Western move and, in a risky gambit, radically changed the situation on the ground.
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POPSRussia’s Armed Forces Advancing, Blindly Russia makes some good equipment, such as air-defence systems. The infusion of money helps it exercise its atrophied military muscles. A growing proportion of soldiers are volunteers (known as kontraktniki), who are more disciplined than much-abused conscripts. The slow move to a smaller, all-professional army in place of the million-strong, largely conscript force is made more urgent by Russia’s demographic decline. The forces that invaded Georgia were largely made up of professionals. Despite problems in keeping them supplied, they were for the most part better behaved than the South Ossetian militiamen who looted and destroyed Georgian villages. The Russian army seems to have fought better in Georgia than it did in either of the post-Soviet wars in Chechnya, the now-subdued breakaway province across the border from Georgia. Indeed, the forces sent into Georgia included the Vostok battalion, made up of pro-Kremlin Chechens. .....continued
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POPSTurkey torn between NATO and Russia Ian Lesser, an expert on Turkey at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, wrote in a recent policy paper. "In theory, Turkey’s proximity to the crisis and desire to play a larger diplomatic role in the Black Sea could make Turkey a lynchpin of NATO strategy in Georgia, especially if rapprochement with Armenia is part of the equation. But Turkish willingness to place its territory at the service of Western policy in Georgia is highly uncertain."
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