DARK TRADE, Written by David Axe

[Downwinder]

Aid-for-bases, failed development reveal the dark side of U.S. “soft power”


In August last year, the senior officer aboard USS Kearsarge, a U.S. Navy ship deployed to Latin America, issued an unusual order. Capt. Frank Ponds ordered the hundreds of sailors, Marines, soldiers and airmen under his command to avoid using the term "troops" when describing themselves to Latin American reporters.

read more:http://columbiacitypaper.com/index.php/News-Commentary/News/Dark-Trade.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Interesting article, but it profoundly "misses the trees for the forest."

The article is about US military "soft power"--for instance, sending the US navy ship "Comfort" on cruises down the West African coast or Latin America's Pacific coast, to provide humanitarian aid--such as medical care services--with the ulterior motive of getting access to small countries' military bases, to be used in time of war. Some critics, even inside the Pentagon, apparently, criticize this practice as the "militarization of humanitarian aid."

But the very biggest instance of Pentagon "soft power"--that is, carrying out military missions for other than military/war purposes--and, by far, the most dangerous to the sovereignty of other countries, and to us--the funders of these activities, US taxpayers, and our children, who may become the "cannon fodder"--is the US "war on drugs."

During the transition from Bush to Obama, I read some military commander in Afghanistan say that the Pentagon was changing its mission in Afghanistan to the "war on drugs"--a convenient, all-purpose "justification" for continued, massive military spending. And I thought: 'Right. The war against OBL is a flop. Got to find some other excuse for all those no-bid contracts!" Last summer, the Bushwhacks changed the bill authorizing "war on drugs" funding ($6 BILLION) to Colombia, to ADD "the war on terror" to the "war on drugs." Presumably now, US taxpayer money will go to killing the leftist guerrillas in Colombia, who have been fighting the fascist narco-thugs running Colombia for some 40 years. Further, the US plans to establish seven* new US military bases in Colombia, which means that our "cannon fodder"--and planes, high tech equipment, bombs and other weapons--will be used to directly kill people in one side of a civil war.

The writer of this article, David Axe, says almost nothing about this. But this is the very biggest instance of the Pentagon "hammering swords into plowshares and back into swords"--utilizing a civilian goal to get (and to give) military funding, and changing the civilian goal into a military goal: flying military planes from South America to Africa in a war situation. And that does not exhaust the possibilities of seven US military bases in Colombia, ostensibly for the "war on drugs" and now to kill FARC guerrillas. For instance, with the newly reconstituted US 4th Fleet in Caribbean (by the Bushwhacks last year), the US military base in Honduras secured by a rightwing military coup, and the seven new US bases in Colombia, the US has Venezuela's main oil reserves and facilities surrounded. Did this same military not just recently slaughter a hundred thousand innocent people, in one week of "shock and awe" bombing alone, to steal their oil?

I don't know who David Axe is, or why he has such a big black hole in his article on Pentagon "soft power." But it does strike me as rather a noticeable black hole. Black holes are a stellar phenomenon that swallow up everything in the vicinity and emit no light.

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*(This author says five new US military bases in Colombia. I've more often read seven; and other documents--such as an Information Sheet issued by the US embassy in Colombia indicates that the number of bases, troops and private contractors is open-ended.)