Chris Hedges: Becoming Hezbollah’s Air Force

[eridani]

We have never been at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Get with the program!

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/becoming_hezbollahs_air_force_20140928

Those who use violence to shape the world, as we have done in the Middle East, unleash a whirlwind. Our initial alliances—achieved at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dead, some $3 trillion in expenditures and the ravaging of infrastructure across the region—have been turned upside down by the cataclysm of violence. Thirteen years of war, and the rise of enemies we did not expect, have transformed Hezbollah fighters inside Syria, along with Iran, into our tacit allies. We are intervening in the Syrian civil war to assist a regime we sought to overthrow. We promised to save Iraq and now help to dismember it. We have delivered Afghanistan to drug cartels and warlords who preside over a ruin of a nation where 60 percent of the children are malnourished and the Taliban is poised to take power once NATO troops depart. The entire misguided enterprise has been a fiasco of gross mismanagement and wanton bloodletting. But that does not mean it will be stopped.

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Violence as a primary form of communication has become normalized. It is not politics by other means. It is politics. Democrats are as infected as Republicans. The war machine is impervious to election cycles. It bombs, kills, maims, tortures, terrorizes and destroys as if on autopilot. It dispenses with humans around the globe as if they were noisome insects. No one dares lift his or her voice to protest against a war policy that is visibly bankrupting the United States, has no hope of success and is going to end with new terrorist attacks on American soil. We have surrendered our political agency and our role as citizens to the masters of war.

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But endless war is not sustainable. States that wage endless war inevitably collapse. They drain their treasuries, are hated by the wretched of the earth, and militarize and strangle their political, social and cultural life while impoverishing and repressing their populations. They are seduced by what Sigmund Freud called the “death instinct.” This is where we are headed. The only question is when it will unravel.

And so here we are

Iran Vows to Attack ISIS in Iraq if They Near Border

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/26137-iran-vows-to-attack-isis-in-iraq-if-they-near-border

Iran will attack Islamic State group jihadists inside Iraq if they advance near the border, ground forces commander General Ahmad Reza Pourdestana said in comments published on Saturday.

"If the terrorist group (IS) come near our borders, we will attack deep into Iraqi territory and we will not allow it to approach our border," the official IRNA news agency quoted Pourdestana as saying.

The Sunni extremists of IS control a swathe of territory north of Baghdad, including in Diyala province, which borders Shiite Iran.

The United States launched air strikes on IS targets in Iraq in August and has since widened them to Syria, where the jihadist group has its headquarters, as part of an international coalition to crush the group.

Iran is a close ally of the Shiite-led government in Iraq and has been unusually accepting of US military action in Iraq against the jihadists.