A Vast Wasteland Of Effort Spent: America's Rampage Through the Middle East

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-Vast-Wasteland-Of-Effort-by-JOHN-CHUCKMAN-Afghanistan_Assassination_Death_Destruction-131116-283.html

A Vast Wasteland Of Effort Spent: America's Rampage Through the Middle East
OpEdNews Op Eds 11/16/2013 at 14:17:25
By JOHN CHUCKMAN

November 13, 2013

I read that six thousand people have been killed by sectarian violence so far this year in Iraq, surely a good rough measure of what America's invasion achieved there. In Afghanistan, America's chosen man publically disagrees with America's ideas of what withdrawal means, how many occupying American forces should remain, and the role the Taleban should play. Killing remains a daily occurrence, including regular instances of American special forces murdering civilians, drugs flow freely through the country and out to the world, and most women still wear the burka. Libya is reduced to rag-tag bands engaged in fighting like rival gangs of bandits. Syria writhes in agony as the victim of an artificially-induced civil war with even the use of nerve gas on civilians by America's proxy fighters winked at and lied about.

Such are just the continuing aftershocks of America's violent, senseless campaign on the Middle East and the Muslim world.

The screams of the hundreds of thousands of initial victims of cluster bombs, Hellfire rockets, depleted-uranium explosions, and white phosphorus were what Condi Rice once described as "the birth cries of a new Middle East," likely just before she set off on another shopping spree to New York for more cute new shoes. You might say Condi and her psychopathic associates assumed the God-like perspective in their work, as the people being devastated were regarded with the importance of ants being squashed by gleeful children in a playground.

Ideas of "nation building" around all the slaughter and destruction are now almost forgotten in the press where they were once earnestly discussed like big-government social programs of the 1960s. It is hard to know whether those ideas were ever taken seriously in Washington by the platoons of Pentagon consultants over expense account lunches or whether they were never intended as more than glib slogans and talking points for politicians' convenience, banners with nice words to cover piles of bleeding bodies. No clear-thinking person ever took the idea seriously, but as we know there is not a great deal of clear thinking in times of war, nor is there much of it at any time among American politicians.

[bemildred]

1. Indeed. nt