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.
