A clip from the article, False Idol of Unfettered Capitalism,
Chris Hedges.....well written piece.


The consumer goods we amass, the status we seek in titles and positions, the ruthlessness we employ to advance our careers, the personal causes we champion, the money we covet and the houses we build and the cars we drive become our pathetic statements of being. They are squalid little monuments to our selves. The more we strive to amass power and possessions the more intolerant and anxious we become. Impulses and emotions, not thoughts but mass feelings, propel us forward. These impulses, carefully manipulated by a consumer society, see us intoxicated with patriotic fervor and a lust for war, a desire to vote for candidates who appeal to us emotionally or to buy this car or that brand. Politicians, advertisers, social scientists, television evangelists, the news media and the entertainment industry have learned what makes us respond. It works. None of us are immune. But when we act in their interests we are rarely acting in our own. The moral philosophies we have ignored, once a staple of a liberal arts education, are a check on the deluge. They call us toward mutual respect and self-sacrifice. They force us to confront the broad, disturbing questions about meaning and existence. And our callous refusal to heed these questions as a society allowed us to believe that unfettered capitalism and the free market were a force of nature, a decree passed down from the divine, the only route to prosperity and power. It turned out to be an idol, and like all idols it has now demanded its human sacrifice.

More on Afghanistan...

We invaded Afghanistan more than seven years ago. We have not broken the back of Al Qaeda or the Taliban. We have not captured or killed Osama bin Laden. We don’t even have an escalation strategy, much less an exit strategy. An honest assessment of the situation, taking into account the woefully corrupt and ineffective Afghan government led by the hapless Hamid Karzai, would lead inexorably to such terms as fiasco and quagmire.
-Bob Herbert, NY Times


Herbert continues, adding that instead of pulling out, we are beginning to, "double down."
Can history act as a guide, for a President and staff who are self-professed students of times past?
Can the new sense of inclusiveness in government also include a realistic argument on our chances for success, and continued costs of failure, in this hostile land? Can it include a realistic snapshot of our men and women being shipped over by the planefull, without even a clear mandate or a clear set of directives? Can we have a realistic conversation with ourselves, as a country, and redefine our new priorities as a weakened nation hobbled by its own hubris? Can we begin to understand that alliances in Afghanistan shift like the sand dunes of Arabia; loyalty is given and taken away at the snap of a gunshot; and tribal loyalties will never lie with a Western force? This great shifting society is also a society of unbelievable resilience; resilience that we, as a nation, should have great envy for; the people of Afghanistan have endured, and are prepared to endure, such a higher level of misfortune than we, even sitting in an unemployment line, could ever imagine.

Again, only history can, and will, judge our actions.....

Another Unwinnable War

another great clip by Robert Greenwald, with his Brave New Films.


--As we become more embroiled in yet another endless, historically unwinnable quagmire of a foreign exercise in Afghanistan...we must ask, when will it end? When will the imperialistic pretenses of this nation be scaled back to something approaching both a proper, humane, and economically reasonable reality? 8 years after 9/11, Islamic Fundamentalism is surging, and our actions have done nothing but fan the flames of this wildfire of humanity...and we must ask ourselves, as a nation: have we learned nothing from our past mistakes, from our past imperialistic hubris and related casualities and destabilizing influences around the world? Is there not a more constructive use of 17,000 US soldiers, such as building schools, building clinics, winning hearts and minds, introducing understanding, instead of forcing our self-imposed change at the barrel of a gun?
I fear this will be Obama's, and all of our's, next Vietnam, if allowed to escalate in the manner that is currently proceeding. We cannot absorb either the cost in dollar terms or the cost in American influence, (soft power and hard power) at this most crucial of moments in American history. And thus, we toss 17,000 more American lives, each with its own web of relations, hopes, dreams, realities, into the raging fires of war, in a hostile land which will never be tamed by and outside hand...And history will be the judge....

and on this note, a fantastic book I read recently about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by Dexter Filkins, aptly named, The Forever War.