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The Pentagon Needs More Wars
by Paul Craig Roberts via reed - Global Research Saturday, Feb 26 2011, 6:48am
international / imperialism / other press

CORPORATE puppet, President Obama, stated openly that the US is looking at all options including military intervention in Libya. So concerned is he over a few thousand casualties that he threatens military invasion -- GIVE THE WORLD A BREAK! There's the 'little' matter of over ONE MILLION DEAD CIVILIANS in Iraq -- the first holocaust of the 21st century -- which the USA is DIRECTLY responsible for; it is now public record that the invasion was orchestrated and based on LIES.

If America is concerned by civilian casualties we SUGGEST the IMMEDIATE CESSATION of ALL Drone activity over Pakistan and Afghanistan -- who the fuck is Washington trying to kid? The only people with their heads up their arses are American. The world is NOW very familiar with star-spangled double standards and brazen HYPOCRISY. If Obama is really so concerned over the loss of innocent life then the US should take its eyes off Libyan oil and focus on ARRESTING MOST OF THE PREVIOUS BUSH ADMINISTRATION for war and other crimes against humanity!


The United States government cannot get enough of war. With Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime falling to a rebelling population, CNN reports that a Pentagon spokesman said that the U.S. is looking at all options from the military side.

Allegedly, the Pentagon, which is responsible for one million dead Iraqis and an unknown number of dead Afghans and Pakistanis, is concerned about the deaths of 1,000 Libyan protesters.

While the Pentagon tries to figure out how to get involved in the Libyan revolt, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific is developing new battle plans to take on China in her home territory. Four-star Admiral Robert Willard thinks the U.S. should be able to whip China in its own coastal waters.

The admiral thinks one way to do this is to add U.S. Marines to his force structure so that the U.S. can eject Chinese forces from disputed islands in the East and South China seas.

It is not the U.S. who is disputing the islands, but if there is a chance for war anywhere, the admiral wants to make sure we are not left out.

The admiral also hopes to develop military ties with India and add that country to his clout. India, the admiral says, “is a natural partner of the United States” and “is crucial to America’s 21st-century strategy of balancing China.” The U.S. is going to seduce the Indians by selling them advanced aircraft.

If the plan works out, we will have India in NATO helping us to occupy Pakistan and presenting China with the possibility of a two-front war.

The Pentagon needs more wars so there can be more “reconstruction.”

Reconstruction is very lucrative, especially as Washington has privatized so many of the projects, thus turning over to well-placed friends many opportunities to loot. Considering all the money that has been spent, one searches hard to find completed projects. The just released report from the Commission on Wartime Contracting can’t say exactly how much of the $200,000 million in Afghan “reconstruction” disappeared in criminal behavior and blatant corruption, but $12,000 million alone was lost to “overt fraud.”

War makes money for the politically connected. While the flag-waving population remains proud of the service of their sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, cousins, wives, mothers and daughters, the smart boys who got the fireworks started are rolling in the mega-millions.

As General Smedley Butler told the jingoistic American population, to no avail, “war is a racket.” As long as the American population remains proud that their relatives serve as cannon fodder for the military/security complex, war will remain a racket.

Author retains copyright.

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Rabid Neo-Con Hawks 'Aroused' over Libya
by Jim Lobe via stan - IPS Saturday, Feb 26 2011, 8:59pm

WASHINGTON, Feb 25, 2011 (IPS) - In a distinct echo of the tactics they pursued to encourage U.S. intervention in the Balkans and Iraq, a familiar clutch of neo-conservatives appealed Friday for the United States and NATO to "immediately" prepare military action to help bring down the regime of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and end the violence that is believed to have killed well over a thousand people in the past week.

The appeal, which came in the form of a letter signed by 40 policy analysts, including more than a dozen former senior officials who served under President George W. Bush, was organised and released by the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a two-year-old neo-conservative group that is widely seen as the successor to the more-famous – or infamous – Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Warning that Libya stood "on the threshold of a moral and humanitarian catastrophe", the letter, which was addressed to President Barack Obama, called for specific immediate steps involving military action, in addition to the imposition of a number of diplomatic and economic sanctions to bring "an end to the murderous Libyan regime".

In particular, it called for Washington to press NATO to "develop operational plans to urgently deploy warplanes to prevent the regime from using fighter jets and helicopter gunships against civilians and carry out other missions as required; (and) move naval assets into Libyan waters" to "aid evacuation efforts and prepare for possible contingencies;" as well as "(e)stablish the capability to disable Libyan naval vessels used to attack civilians."

Among the letter's signers were former Bush deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Bush's top global democracy and Middle East adviser; Elliott Abrams; former Bush speechwriters Marc Thiessen and Peter Wehner; Vice President Dick Cheney's former deputy national security adviser, John Hannah, as well as FPI's four directors: Weekly Standard editor William Kristol; Brookings Institution fellow Robert Kagan; former Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor; and former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Ambassador to Turkey, Eric Edelman.

It was Kagan and Kristol who co-founded and directed PNAC in its heyday from 1997 to the end of Bush's term in 2005.

The letter comes amid growing pressure on Obama, including from liberal hawks, to take stronger action against Gaddafi.

Two prominent senators whose foreign policy views often reflect neo-conservative thinking, Republican John McCain and Independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman, called Friday in Tel Aviv for Washington to supply Libyan rebels with arms, among other steps, including establishing a no-fly zone over the country.

On Wednesday, Obama said his staff was preparing a "full range of options" for action. He also announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet fly to Geneva Monday for a foreign ministers' meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council to discuss possible multilateral actions.

"They want to keep open the idea that there's a mix of capabilities they can deploy – whether it's a no-fly zone, freezing foreign assets of Gaddafi's family, doing something to prevent the transport of mercenaries (hired by Gaddafi) to Libya, targeting sanctions against some of his supporters to persuade them to abandon him," said Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation, who took part in a meeting of independent foreign policy analysts, including Abrams, with senior National Security Council staff at the White House Thursday.

During the 1990s, neo-conservatives consistently lobbied for military pressure to be deployed against so-called "rogue states", especially in the Middle East.

After the 1991 Gulf War, for example, many "neo-cons" expressed bitter disappointment that U.S. troops stopped at the Kuwaiti border instead of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein.

When the Iraqi president then unleashed his forces against Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia insurgents in the south, they – along with many liberal interventionist allies – pressed President George H.W. Bush to impose "no-fly zones" over both regions and take additional actions - much as they are now proposing for Libya - designed to weaken the regime's military repressive capacity.

Those actions set the pattern for the 1990s. To the end of the decade, neo-conservatives, often operating under the auspices of a so-called "letterhead organisation", such as PNAC, worked – often with the help of some liberal internationalists eager to establish a right of humanitarian intervention - to press President Bill Clinton to take military action against adversaries in the Balkans – in Bosnia and then Kosovo – as well as Iraq.

Within days of 9/11, for example, PNAC issued a letter signed by 41 prominent individuals – almost all neo- conservatives, including 10 of the Libya letter's signers – that called for military action to "remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq", as well as retaliation against Iran and Syria if they did not immediately end their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

PNAC and its associates subsequently worked closely with neo-conservatives inside the Bush administration, including Abrams, Wolfowitz, and Edelman, to achieve those aims.

While neo-conservatives were among the first to call for military action against Gaddafi in the past week, some prominent liberals and rights activists have rallied to the call, including three of the letter's signatories: Neil Hicks of Human Rights First; Bill Clinton's human rights chief, John Shattuck; and Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, who also signed the PNAC Iraq letter 10 years ago.

In addition, Anne-Marie Slaughter, until last month the influential director of the State Department's Policy Planning office, cited the U.S.-NATO Kosovo campaign as a possible precedent. "The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan protesters," she wrote on Twitter. "In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted."

Such comments evoked strong reactions from some military experts, however.

"I'm horrified to read liberal interventionists continue to suggest the ease with which humanitarian crises and regional conflicts can be solved by the application of military power," wrote Andrew Exum, a counter-insurgency specialist at the Center for a New American Security, whose Abu Muqawama blog is widely read here. "To speak so glibly of such things reflects a very immature understanding of the limits of force and the difficulties and complexities of contemporary military operations."

Other commentators noted that a renewed coalition of neo- conservatives and liberal interventionists would be much harder to put together now than during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

"We now have Iraq and Afghanistan as warning signs, as well as our fiscal crisis, so I don't think there's an enormous appetite on Capitol Hill or among the public for yet another military engagement," said Charles Kupchan, a foreign policy specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

"I support diplomatic and economic sanctions, but I would stop well short of advocating military action, including the imposition of a no-fly zone," he added, noting, in any event, that most of the killing in Libya this week has been carried out by mercenaries and paramilitaries on foot or from vehicles.

"There may be some things we can do – such as airlifting humanitarian supplies to border regions where there are growing number of refugees, but I would do so only with the full support of the Arab League and African Union, if not the U.N.," said Clemons.

"(The neo-conservatives) are essentially pro-intervention, pro-war, without regard to the costs to the country," he told IPS. "They don't recognise that we're incredibly over- extended and that the kinds of things they want us to do actually further weaken our already-eroded stock of American power."

© 2011 IPS-Inter Press Service

Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Abrams and Feith
Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Abrams and Feith


 
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