There Are None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See
There Are None So Blind
As Those Who Will Not See
By Philip Giraldi
Philip Giraldi ( is a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a columnist and television commentator who is the Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a group that advocates for more even handed policies by the U.S. government in the Middle East.
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My wife and I had a number of visitors over the holidays, including several foreign friends from our time spent in Europe and the Middle East. Both the Americans and the visitors from overseas eventually came around to wanting to discuss how deformed United States foreign policy has become, noting generally that the elite that runs Washington seems to have no clue about what is going on outside the continental U.S. Worse, there appears to be no appreciation for how negatively the rest of the world views the United States. Several marveled at the mind boggling formulaic speech made by President Barack Obama at Christmas in which he announced that the United States had officially “ended its fighting role” in Afghanistan, a blatant bit of misdirection in that Washington is retaining more than 10,800 troops in the country with full authorization to engage the Taliban as necessary.
President Obama fancies himself the leader of the “free world” yet he heads a nation that until recently organized black site prisons for torturing suspects and which continues to use armed drones to kill innocent and guilty alike. One friend asked why is it that so many outwardly intelligent people in the White House and its various agencies can get so many things so wrong. As the dysfunction dominates both Democratic and Republican administrations and runs the gamut from the political left to the political right one must assume that there is a fundamental flaw in the way Washington goes about its business, though it might also be observed that liberal democracy promoters and neoconservative regime changers generally come to the same consensus conclusion when confronted by a foreign crisis. They opt for military intervention.
Broader issues rarely surface because the simplistic and violent solution to address all foreign policy ills drives the process. Regarding the war against ISIS, an observant former Army officer friend opined in a Christmas email “Here is why we are losing. They’ll look at any answer but the correct one: we (the West) are self-evidently waging war against the Islamic people for all intents and purposes, and the targeted people are looking to those they see as fighting back in their defense.” A former FBI officer asked “How can making ourselves into the most hated nation on Earth possibly have any benefits?”
To return to the example of Afghanistan one might wonder why Samantha Power, Susan Rice and President Barack Obama himself have not read the recent excellent analysis by Kelley Vlahos and also a piece by Pamela Constable in the Washington Post? Do they know something the rest of us do not know? Undoubtedly, but how are they interpreting what they have learned? Afghanistan after thirteen years of outside interference is ungovernable and it has evolved into a completely corrupted narco-kleptocracy that has become a bloody money pit. The bid to convert the country into a drug and terrorist free bastion of democracy and women’s rights has been a fantasy from start to finish. Whenever the last foreign troops eventually leave the country will revert to form and it won’t be pretty.
So why is Obama going through the charade? My friends and I concluded that it is all politics. The White House was blamed for losing Iraq when the government in Baghdad forced the U.S. military to depart in 2011 and it doesn’t want the Democrats to be blamed for also losing what the president has described as the “good war” in Afghanistan. Obama may be a lame duck personally but there is always an election coming up, in this case the 2016 presidential race where the usual culprits are already lining up and waving their national security credentials.
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40655.htm
= new reply since forum marked as read
there's no honor, no courage - it is sickening, and what is worse is there's plenty of DUers who actually BELIEVE that piece of shit war is over and are adding it to THE LIST 
