Saturday, July 9, 2011

Multi-Billion Dollar Terrorists and the Disappearing Middle Class



By James Petras
07.07.2011

"The US government (White House and Congress) spends $10 billion dollars a month or $120 billion a year to fight an estimated 50 -75 “Al Qaeda types” (Financial Times 6/25 -26/11, p. 5) in Afghanistan. During the Obama presidency, Washington has spent $300 billion dollars over a 30 month period, which comes to $4 billion dollars for each terrorist in Afghanistan.....

It is absurd to believe that the Pentagon and White House are spending $10 billion a month to hunt down a handful of terrorists. So what is the war in Afghanistan about?....

If the US war in Afghanistan is not about defeating terrorism, then why the massive expenditure of funds and manpower for over a decade?
Several hypotheses come to mind.....

Fourthly, the initial success of the Afghan war was seen as a prelude to a sequence of successful wars, to be followed by Iraq, Iran, Syria and beyond, which would serve the triple purpose of enhancing Israeli power,controlling strategic oil resources and enlarging the arc of US military bases from South and Central Asia, through the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.

The strategic policies formulated by the militarists and zionists in the Bush and Obama Administrations, assumed that guns, money, force and bribes could build stable satellite states firmly within the orbit of the post-Soviet, US empire. Afghanistan was seen as an easy first conquest, to sequential wars. Each victory, it was assumed would undermine domestic and allied (European) opposition. The initial costs of imperial war would be paid for by tribute extracted from the conquered countries, especially in the oil producing region....

As far as neo-conservative pipe dreams, of successful sequential wars, cooked up by Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Libby et al to eliminate Israeli adversaries and turn the Persian Gulf into a Hebrew lake, the prolonged wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan has resulted in the rise of Iranian influence, turned the mass of Pakistani’s against the US and strengthened the mass movements against US clients throughout the Middle East. “Sequential imperial defeats” has resulted in a vast bleeding of the US treasury, rather than the “extraction” of oil wealth from tributary clients....

Conclusion

But there is deep unease within the leading circles of the Obama regime: the “wise guys” among top officials are jumping ship before the coming deluge. Summers, Emmanuel,Levey, Orzag, Gates, Geithner and others responsible for the disastrous wars, economic catastrophe, the concentration of wealth and savaging of living standards, have walked out leaving it to the con-men Obama, Biden and their ‘last loyalists’ to take the hit when the economy takes the Big Plunge and social programs are wiped out. How else can we explain their hasty departures in the face of a deepening crisis? The flight of top officials is to avoid political responsibility, to avoid a historical indictment for the impending economic debacle and the future judgment over who and what led to the destruction of the American middle and working class, its jobs, its pensions, its social security and its place in the world. "

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