Deaf, Dumb and Blind
US Treasury is Running on Fumes
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The White House is
screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War
Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at
risk.”
What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of
American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our
partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at
risk.
Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military
that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks. This means that there is a
spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.
And rightly so. The leaked documents show that the
US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and
military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure
of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to
keep secret.
If Obama cared about the lives of our soldiers, he
would not have sent them to a war, the purpose of which he cannot
identify. Earlier in his regime, Obama admitted that he did not know
what the mission was in Afghanistan. He vowed to find out what the
mission was and to tell us, but he never did. After being read the riot
act by the military/security complex, which recycles war profits into
political campaign contributions, Obama simply declared the war to be
“necessary.” No one has ever explained why the war is necessary.
The government cannot explain why the war is
necessary, because it is not necessary to the American people. Any
necessary reason for the war has to do with the enrichment of narrow
private interests and with undeclared agendas. If the agendas were
declared and the private interests being served identified, even the
American sheeple might revolt.
The Obama regime has made war the business of
America. Escalation in Afghanistan has gone hand in hand with drone
attacks on Pakistan and the use of proxy forces to conduct wars in
Pakistan and North Africa. Currently, the US is conducting provocative
naval exercises off the coasts of China and North Korea and instigating
war between Columbia and Venezuela in South America. Former CIA director
Michael Hayden declared on July 25 that an attack on Iran seems
unavoidable.
With the print and TV media captive, why doesn’t
Washington simply tell us that the country is at war without going to
the trouble of war? That way the munitions industry can lay off its
workers and put the military appropriations directly into profits. We
could avoid the war crimes and wasted lives of our soldiers.
The US economy and the well-being of Americans are
being sacrificed to the regime’s wars. The states are broke and laying
off teachers. Even “rich” California, formerly touted as “the seventh
largest economy in the world,” is reduced to issuing script and cutting
its state workers’ pay to the minimum wage.
Supplemental war appropriations have become routine
affairs, but the budget deficit is invoked to block any aid to
Americans--but not to Israel. On July 25 the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz,
reported that the US and Israel had signed a multi-billion dollar deal
for Boeing to provide Israel with a missile system.
Americans can get no help out of Washington, but
the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, declared that Washington’s
commitment to Israel’s security is “not negotiable.” Washington’s
commitment to California and to the security of the rest of us is
negotiable. War spending has run up the budget deficit, and the deficit
precludes any help for Americans.
With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s
largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating.
The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared: “The US is
insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.”
On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire,
warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness
brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer
than we think.
Deaf, dumb, and blind, Washington policymakers prattle on about “thirty more
years of war.”
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant
Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has
just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at:
[email protected]
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts07282010.html
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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