Topic: Ending the bush wars

[shadylane]

It's been quiet on the right wing front about ending the GW bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I wonder why?

[fish]

Read the news much? We aren't in Iraq. Nobama followed W's drawdown plan! Nobama owns the war in Afghanistan. 74% of US casualties happened during his term. He is on his second term and we are still there. That's on nobama, not W. I don't here anything from the left. Why are they quiet and not criticized?

[mark]

The wars are about rich people getting richer! Selling war machines, heroine, and whatever else they can get their greedy little hands on. Has nothing to do with left or right. The puppets that you guys argue about all the time have been bought and paid for long ago!

[Hi]

Hey for once i can say i agree with Mark!!! Today is a new day!!! 

[Hi]

Judge Napolitano: How to get fired from Fox Business in under 5 mins


The only thing ill ever post from fox news....he got fired for this btw.

[fish]

no it didn't hi. maybe stop cherry picking articles and stick with facts??

http://www.constitutionaldaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=1473:what-didnt-get-judge-napolitano-fired

[Hi]

I stand corrected....either way the video has good points.

[Hi]

I think you took the wrong point of the post fish...its about the message.

[fish]

The message still isn't the reason his show was cancelled. that is what you missed. read the post again!

[shadylane]

The wars are about rich people getting richer! Selling war machines, heroine, and whatever else they can get their greedy little hands on. Has nothing to do with left or right. The puppets that you guys argue about all the time have been bought and paid for long ago!

Mark, there was a political debate about to break out. And you had to throw the cold water of truth on it.
You should be ashamed.

[shadylane]

Since we're on the subject of "The wars are about rich people getting richer"
Would someone mention  Dick Chenny and Haliburtan.

[fish]

nobama ok'd no bid contracts to haliburtin. old news shady. Cheny divested himself from haliburtin. his retirement was earned.

[Racer]

Omg,  lol, lol lol

[Hi]

If cheney was a poor black man hed be in jail right now

[mark]

They are ALL crooks!

[shadylane]

If cheney was a poor black man hed be in jail right now

No, he would be dead. Poor people don't get the kind of health care the rich do.

Here's a quote from the dick himself.

Was Mr. Cheney aware of the anecdotal evidence suggesting that recipients of new hearts sometimes acquire the personality traits of their donor?

“It’s funny,” he said. “A friend of mine asked me to describe the experience and I said, ‘You know, it’s fundamentally a spiritual experience.’ So he said, ‘Does that mean that you woke up a Democrat? I said, ‘It wasn’t that spiritual.’”

[fish]

when you have to resort to class warfare and race cards, you have lost the debate! LOL LOL LOL

[shadylane]

The Debate is about ending the bush wars.
These wars were started to make the rich richer.
And the majority of the casualties are middle eastern.
It's definitely to the rich peoples advantage if no one talks about class warfare or race....

[fish]

look at the pictures from 9/11. it's pretty clear what started the wars and it wasn't W. we were attacked. we did not attack Iraq or Afghanistan, we responded to the attacks on us.

The Iraq war is over
we are out of Afghanistan by year end
what are you bitching for?

Your hero nobama owns the war in Afghanistan, 5 yrs into his presidency. Why are we there? why not defund the wars and bring everyone back...now?
The blame is on your hero, not his predecessors

The majority of those middle eastern casualties were in mass graves dug   and filled on saddam's order's.

I am not rich, but the low  information voters love to throw the race card and class warfare into debates they are losing.

[matrsnot]

I agree we need to get out of Afghanistan.  There are other more important issues your dicktator needs to address.  IRS, FELON AS THE AG, SOLYNDRA, BENGHAZIE, FAST AND FURIOUS.  OBAMA'S own felonies committed while in office.  Felonies you say?  How about making up his own laws as he goes along.  Defying the laws of the land?  DOMA, refusal to enforce 1964 Civil Right Act because the offenders are black, illegally changing the law (ACA) to name a few.  Yes we need to stop the wars and get on to important things.....Like Impeachment

[Hi]

nobama ok'd no bid contracts to haliburtin. old news shady. Cheny divested himself from haliburtin. his retirement was earned.

Divested himself.....while recieving back compensation at the same time he held stock options, and no bid contracts during his term ...................Halliburton has become the object of several controversies involving the 2003 Iraq War and the company's ties to former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney retired from the company during the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign with a severance package worth $36 million. As of 2004, he had received $398,548 in deferred compensation from Halliburton while Vice President. Cheney was chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 and has received stock options from Halliburton.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Halliburton was awarded a $7 billion contract for which 'unusually' only Halliburton was allowed to bid.

I dont think divested means what you think it means

[fish]

Cheney is receiving retirement he earned. He has been thoroughly vetted by the dems. If anything was illegal, he would have been charged!

Like it or not, Halliburton was and still is the only corp. capable of fast response and providing the volume of service required on short notice. How long has Halliburton been operating in the middle east? nobama had no problem using them!

This is all ancient history hi. maybe spend more time on research how diane Feinstein steered defense projects to her husbands construction company for yrs? when this was discovered what happened? she resigned from the senate armed services committee, no indictment!  but that  is ok?

[shadylane]

What if, bush and dick had been democrat's?
What would the right wingers have to say about the bush wars, 911 and dicks company getting unbid contracts.

[mark]

This is why we are in Afghanistan! 50 deaths and 500 overdoses in Pulaski co. alone!
  CIA, Heroin Still Rule Day in Afghanistan

By Victor Thorn

Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue. Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).

The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.

Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders. To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.

Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered. While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.


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Behind the scenes, the CIA, along with Pakistan’s ISI, were secretly funding Afghanistan’s mujahideen to fight their Russian foes. Prior to this war, opium production in Afghanistan was minimal. But according to historian Alfred McCoy, an expert on the subject, a shift in focus took place. “Within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer.”

Soon,  as Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes, “CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade. As the mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant poppies as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories.”

Eventually, the Soviet Union was defeated (their version of Vietnam), and ultimately lost the Cold War. The aftermath, however, proved to be an entirely new can of worms. During his research, McCoy discovered that “the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection.”

By 1994, a new force emerged in the region—the Taliban—that took over the drug trade. Chossudovsky again discovered that “the Americans had secretly, and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI], supported the Taliban’s assumption of power.”

These strange bedfellows endured a rocky relationship until July 2000 when Taliban leaders banned the planting of poppies. This alarming development, along with other disagreements over proposed oil pipelines through Eurasia, posed a serious problem for power centers in the West. Without heroin money at their disposal, billions of dollars could not be funneled into various CIA black budget projects. Already sensing trouble in this volatile region, 18 influential neo-cons signed a letter in 1998 which became a blueprint for war—the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC).

Fifteen days after 9-11, CIA Director George Tenet sent his top-secret Special Operations Group (SOG) into Afghanistan. One of the biggest revelations in Tenet’s book, At the Center of the Storm, was that CIA forces directed the Afghanistan invasion, not the Pentagon.

In the Jan. 26, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Douglas Waller describes Donald Rumsfeld’s reaction to this development. “When aides told Rumsfeld that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn’t go into Afghanistan until the CIA contingent had lain the groundwork with


local warlords, he erupted, ‘I have all these guys under arms, and we’ve got to wait like little birds in a nest for the CIA to let us go in?’”

ARMITAGE A MAJOR PLAYER

But the real operator in Afghanistan was Richard Armitage, a man whose legend includes being the biggest heroin trafficker in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War; director of the State Department’s Foreign Narcotics Control Office (a front for CIA drug dealing); head of the Far East Company (used to funnel drug money out of the Golden Triangle); a close liaison with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra cocaine-for-guns scandal; a primary Pentagon official in the terror and covert ops field under George Bush the Elder; one of the original signatories of the infamous PNAC document; and the man who helped CIA Director William Casey run weapons to the mujahideen during their war against the Soviet Union. Armitage was also stationed in Iran during the mid-1970s right before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah. Armitage may well be the greatest covert operator in U.S. history.

On Sept. 10, 2001, Armitage met with the UK’s national security advisor, Sir David Manning. Was Armitage “passing on specific intelligence information about the impending terrorist attacks”? The scenario is plausible because one day later—on 9-11—Dick Cheney directly called for Armitage’s presence down in his bunker. Immediately after WTC 2 was struck, Armitage told BBC Radio, “I was told to go to the operations center [where] I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice president.”

These two share a long history together. Not only was Armitage employed by Cheney’s former company Halliburton (via Brown & Root), he was also a deputy when Cheney was secretary of defense under Bush the Elder. More importantly, Cheney and Armitage had joint business and consulting interests in the Central Asian pipeline which had been contracted by Unocal. The only problem standing between them and the Caspian Sea’s vast energy reserves was the Taliban.

Since the 1980s, Armitage amassed a huge roster of allies in Pakistan’s ISI. He was also one of the “Vulcans”—along with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Rabbi Dov Zakheim—who coordinated Bush’s geo-strategic foreign policy initiatives. Then, after 9-11, he negotiated with the Pakistanis prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, while also becoming Bush’s deputy secretary of state stationed in Afghanistan.

Our “enemy,” or course, was the Taliban “terrorists.” But George Tenet, Colin Powell, Porter Goss, and Armitage had developed a close relationship with Pakistan’s military head of the ISI—General Mahmoud Ahmad— who was cited in a Sept. 2001 FBI report as “supporting and financing the alleged 9-11 terrorists, as well as having links to al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

The line between friend and foe gets even murkier. Afghan President Hamid Karzai not only collaborated with the Taliban, but he was also on Unocal’s payroll in the mid-1990s. He is also described by Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan newspaper as being  “a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s that collaborated with the CIA in funding U.S. aid to the Taliban.”

Capturing a new, abundant source for heroin was an integral part of the U.S. “war on terror.” Hamid Karzai is a puppet ruler of the CIA; Afghanistan is a full-fledged narco-state; and the poppies that flourish there have yet to be eradicated, as was proven in 2003 when the Bush administration refused to destroy the crops, despite having the chance to do so. Major drug dealers are rarely arrested, smugglers enjoy carte blanche immunity, and Nushin Arbabzadah, writing for The Guardian, theorized that “U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs.” Is that why the military protested so vehemently when reporters tried to photograph returning caskets?
 
 
 

[shadylane]

Pat Buchanan
By Pat Buchanan
January 21, 2014 3:00 AM
 

 
"He ended one war and kept us out of any other," is the tribute paid President Eisenhower.


Ike ended the Korean conflict in 1953, refused to intervene to save the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and, rather than back the British-
French-Israeli invasion, ordered them all out of Egypt in 1956.

Ending America longest wars may prove to be Barack Obama's legacy.

For, while ending wars without victory may not garner from the historians' the accolade of "great" or "near great," it is sometimes the duty of a president who has inherited a war the nation no longer wishes to fight.

That was Nixon's fate, as well as Ike's, and Obama's.

And as we look back at our interventions in the 21st century, where are the gains of all our fighting, bleeding and dying?

We know the costs — 8,000 dead, 40,000 wounded, $2 trillion in wealth sunk. But where are the benefits?

After Moammar Gadhafi fell in Libya, the mercenaries he had hired returned to Mali. The French had to intervene. In Benghazi, the city we started the war to save, a U.S. ambassador and three Americans would be murdered by terrorists.

Libya today appears to be breaking apart.

While Gadhafi was dreadful, what threat was he to us, especially after he had surrendered his weapons of mass destruction?

In Egypt, we helped overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and hailed the election of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammad Morsi.

A year later, we green-lighted Morsi's overthrow by Mubarak's army.

Terrorism has returned to Egypt, the Sinai is now a no man's land, and almost all Egypt hates us now.

The Shia regime we brought to power in Iraq has so repressed the Sunnis that Anbar province is now hosting al-Qaida. Fallujah and Ramadi have fallen. President Nuri al-Maliki is asking for U.S. weapons to retrieve Anbar and for U.S. personnel to train his soldiers.

Unlike the bad, old Iraq, the new Iraq tilts to Tehran.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has refused to sign a status of forces agreement giving our troops legal protections if they remain. This could cause a complete U.S. pullout in 2014, leading to the return of the Taliban we drove out in 2001.

Sunday saw terrorism in the heart of Kabul, with a restaurant favored by foreign officials targeted by a car bomb, followed by a machine-gunning of dining patrons in which 21 were killed.

Americans have fought bravely there for a dozen years. But how has our nation building in the Hindu Kush benefited the good old USA?

Pakistan, with nuclear weapons, has become a haven of the Taliban, perhaps the most dangerous country on earth. Anti-American elements in the Khyber region have, because of our drone attacks, been blocking a U.S. troop exodus to the sea.

How enduring is what we accomplished in Afghanistan?

Last summer, Obama, goaded by democracy crusaders and the War Party, was about to launch strikes on Syria when America arose as one to call a halt.

We did not attack Syria. Had we, we would have struck a blow for an insurgency dominated by the al-Nusra Front and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The ISIS goal? Detach Anbar from Iraq and unite it with jihadist-occupied sectors of Syria in a new caliphate.

Can we not see that Bashar Assad's worst enemies are ours as well?

Syria's civil war, which has cost 100,000 dead, with millions uprooted and a million in exile, has spilled over into Lebanon, where Hezbollah backs Assad and the Sunnis back the rebels.

The neoconservatives say much of this might have been averted, had we left a stronger contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq and supported the Syrian uprising before the jihadists took control.

They were for attacking Assad last summer, are for more severe sanctions on Iran now, and are for war if Iran does not give up all enrichment of uranium.

But the neocons have broken their pick with the people. For they have been wrong about just about everything.

They were wrong about Saddam's WMD and a "cakewalk" war.

They were wrong about how welcome we would be in Iraq and how Baghdad would become a flourishing democracy and model for the Mideast.

They did not see the Sunni-Shia war our intervention would ignite.

They were wrong about how our interests would be served in attacking Libya.

They did not see the disaster that would unfold in Pakistan.

While we did not follow their advice and attack Syria, how have we suffered from having taken a pass on Syria's civil-sectarian war?

From Libya to Lebanon, Syria to Yemen, Iraq to Afghanistan, the Maghreb and Middle East are aflame. What have we lost by getting out of the wars Obama found us in? How would we benefit from parachuting back into the middle of the fire?

Which raises a related question: Was Obama wrong in extricating us from the wars into which George W. Bush plunged his country?

How will history answer that one?

Patrick J. Buchanan

[mark]

Those who have the gold ....make the rules.  They give a little smitance to our gov. officials  and then do what's most profitable for them. Even if it means killing their Mother or Grandchildren! End the Fed! Fire all of congress! Impeach Obama and his cohorts! Reduce the size of government! Don't allow PACs or any other bribes to our officials! How? IDW..... Rand Paul would be a good start! (I tried to vote for Ron Paul in the primary and was told by the ELECTION OFFICIALS  that my flea flickin vote would not count for anything??

[fish]

nobama followed W's drawdown plan for iraq that was already in place. Why hasn't the funding been cut for Afghanistan? Then we would have to leave. review how the Vietnam war ended. the house ways and means committee cut off funding.
nobama supported the muslim brother hood. How did that work out? It made things in Egypt worse. what this admin. needs to do is let the arab league settle the problems in the middle east. Some people forget about facts or want to deny them. Iraq was not a war of choice. following 9/11 it was a war of no choice. saddam did have wmd. it was found. but more importantly he was harboring and supporting the terrorists that attacked us.
truths many want to ignore.