Cost-Benefit Analysis of Air Force Weapons Systems Being used in Afghanistan

Quickly overshadowed by the TSA controversy of full body scanners and infotainment stories about consumer spending on Black Friday, and then the coverage of US State Department communications released by Wikileaks, the perpetual war in Afghanistan has again drifted into the subconscious of the American public. Unfortunately, innocent Afghan civilians killed by indiscriminate aerial bombing and for the members of NATO’s International Security Afghanistan Force (ISAF) serving as cannon fodder; do not have the same luxury as the self-obsessed, tweeting, and texting American population.

Barely a week after a NATO summit, where political leaders publicly revealed an exit strategy centered on progressively handing security over to the local Afghan forces, an Afghan border policeman killed six American service members during a training mission. While this latest incident raises the question about the loyalty and reliability of Afghan forces and the continuing problem of being infiltrated by the Taliban, the latest attack by an Afghan security force member on NATO troops reveal the almost certain failure of the U.S. led and NATO supported mission in Afghanistan.

According to BBC Kabul correspondent Paul Wood:

The Afghan interior ministry says new recruits are checked to make sure they do not have a criminal record - and their village elders have to vouch for their good character. So there is a vetting procedure for recruits to the Afghan forces - but it is not extensive.

In addition, so many new recruits are being taken on, it is doubtful how thorough the checks can be. There are now some 260,000 members of the Afghan security forces - 160,000 were trained in the last year. The US alone is spending some $11bn (£7bn) a year on training the Afghan security forces.

Five British soldiers were shot dead in November last year in Helmand province, by an Afghan policeman, possibly a militant infiltrator, who then escaped.

Isaf is training and mentoring Afghanistan's security forces, but there have also been several incidents of Afghan soldiers firing on foreign troops.

Nato said earlier this month it was investigating Taliban claims that an Afghan soldier had shot dead foreign troops in the south of the country.

In July a renegade Afghan soldier shot and killed three British army Gurkhas at a base in Helmand province.

A week earlier an Afghan soldier killed two American contractors inside a military base in northern Afghanistan.

The futile and almost guaranteed failure of the NATO and U.S. led mission in Afghanistan lies at the fundamental problems facing the country. These include the high amounts of illiteracy and drug addition among recruits joining the Afghan security forces, and high levels of corruption inside the Afghanistan government.

Undermining the already formidable challenges to recruit, train, and equip a reliable and competent Afghan security force, is the recent decision by the United States to step up its use of air power to fight a ground war. Compounding the already flawed strategic decision to use air power to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the use of high performance Cold War era fighter jets designed to fight the Soviet Union.

As Chalmers Johnson masterfully observed in his book, Dismantling the Empire:

The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics, which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter-that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar-but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.

The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to “fourth-generation wars” such as that with the Taliban in Afghanistan-the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.

As the aforementioned paragraph put the issue of using high performance aircraft designed to fight a war of attrition with the former Soviet Union or perhaps with China into context with the current needs of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, the following paragraph from Johnson expands on this further.

Northrop Grumman’s much-touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hanger first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform, at a cost of $ 44.75 billion for only twenty-one bombers-it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.

Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the “Warthog”. It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force’s hotshot self-image.

Some 715 A-10s were produced, and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that can fly in straight lines at high altitudes, rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.

The failure of the press to continue to report on the Afghanistan war on a daily basis facilitates the continuing plundering of the American treasury by politically connected defense firms and private contractors.

How Incompetence is Hidden Behind a Wall of Secrecy

Pfc. Bradley Manning

The release of a quarter of a million electronic documents downloaded by a lowly Private First Class in Iraq, is another glaring example of how incompetent the US government is when it comes to national security. Although most Americans think that Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, and other national security state apparatus institutions are well-oiled machines, the truth could not be further from reality. As Chalmers Johnson would have almost assuredly observed, the fact that a lowly private can have access to sensitive information that is only intended to be viewed by senior policy officials, is further proof at how national security state apparatus institutions and especially the Central Intelligence Agency, hide their incompetence behind a wall of secrecy.

The young Army Pfc. suspected of stealing the diplomatic memos, many of them classified, and feeding them to WikiLeaks may have defeated Pentagon security systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer memory stick.

Instead of the US government and apologists for the national security state apparatus in the main stream media attacking WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for releasing the State Department documents, the U.S. press should be asking the more important questions such as, what does the American government want biometric data of UN senior officials for, and why are Saudi donors still the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda. In addition to these questions, media outlets and Op-Ed columnists should be asking why the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, a generous host to the American military for years, was the “worst in the region” in counterterrorism efforts. According to a State Department cable last December, Qatar’s security service was “hesitant to act against known terrorists out of concern for appearing to be aligned with the U.S. and provoking reprisals”.

Even though the tiny Gulf nation is home to three major U.S. military bases and received over $ 110 million dollars in 2000 for two of those bases, the autocratic leadership of Qatar has no problem taking U.S. money. In addition to the al-Udeid Air Force Base, the United States taxpayer also supports Camp as-Sayliyah located on the outskirts of Doha and Camp Snoopy, located at Doha International Airport.

The failure of the Qatar government to be more involved in fighting the global war on terrorism started by George W. Bush and continued by Barack Obama is particularly disturbing in an era of trillion dollar deficits. Demonstrating how the Obama administration is no different than the Bush administration and how the elements of militarism transcend both political parties in Washington DC, in addition to freezing federal worker pay for the next two years, Congress should also close the three military bases in Qatar.

Like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 and the recent story of US Soldiers keeping body parts in Afghanistan as war trophy’s, the recent press story of the US government lashing out at the founder of WikiLeaks encourages the U.S. media to focus on the actions of low ranking soldiers, and diverts attention away from the higher-level policy makers.

As anthropologist Laura Nader noted in her 1969 essay entitled, “Up the Anthropologist”, the study of social systems is often directed downwards, at those less powerful in a society rather than those in power. By focusing on the low-level actions of individual soldiers, the media hinders the American public from beginning to question the more substantive constitutional and moral implications of a country in perpetual state of war.

According to a recent Associated Press article:

A senior Defense Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the criminal case against Manning is pending, said he was unaware of any firings or other discipline over the security conditions at Manning's post in Iraq.

In an era of high unemployment and over 15 million Americans out of work, it is outrageous that no one inside the national security state apparatus has been fired over the actions of young Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Chalmers Johnson: Influential scholar and a true American patriot

Chalmers Johnson, influential scholar of East Asia and a leading anti-imperialist scholar recently passed away at the age of 79 due to complications of long-term rheumatoid arthritis. While most of the mainstream media and a majority of Americans don't know who Mr. Johnson was, for genuine American patriots and intellectual members of the anti-imperial school of thought, the passing of Mr. Johnson is a great loss.

From the LA Times:

Born in Phoenix on Aug. 6, 1931, Johnson moved to Alameda, Calif., with his family in 1945. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics from UC Berkeley in 1953. He then served as a naval officer for two years and began studying Japanese on his own while stationed in Japan.

Returning to UC Berkeley, he earned a master's degree in political science in 1957 and a doctorate in political science in 1961.

While a faculty member at UC Berkeley from 1962 to 1988, he served as chairman of the political science department and chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies. He also was an unpaid consultant to the CIA's Office of National Estimates from 1968 to '77.

In 1988, he joined the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego. He retired from the university in 1992.

Johnson also was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS series "The Pacific Century" and played a prominent on-camera role in the PBS "Frontline" documentary "Losing the War with Japan."

As Mr. Johnson first gained academic distinction with his 1962 dissertation, "Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945," Johnson also wrote an even more influential book about Japan in 1982 entitled: "MITI and the Japanese Miracle”. In this book, Chalmers Johnson argued that the Japanese government and MITI, (Ministry of International Trade and Industry) was the most influential player in the Japanese economy, in contrast to the more widely held view that the private sector was the driving force behind the Japanese economy. "MITI and the Japanese Miracle", led Mr. Johnson to become known as the ‘godfather’ of the revisionist school of Japanese political economy.

According to a Washington Post obituary of Mr. Johnson:

It was in the research for that book that Dr. Johnson said he initially became disenfranchised with what he would later term "American imperialism" abroad and led him "to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported."

His weakening opinion of the expansion of unchecked military influence on U.S. foreign policy was solidified in 1995 after three American servicemen in Okinawa were convicted of raping a 12-year-old-Japanese girl.

In Dr. Johnson's mind, the troops should not have been stationed in Okinawa - the location of one of the Marine Corps' largest installations overseas - in the first place.

The military leadership, Dr. Johnson argued, suffered from an impulsive need to build and maintain bases in foreign countries that was formed during height of anxiety in the Cold War.

Constructing and keeping U.S. military property and manpower overseas was little more than colonization, Dr. Johnson said. The policy, he added, would ultimately poison America's long-term interests and bankrupt the country not only money but also political clout. Dr. Johnson dissected his theories on American imperialism with a series of books, beginning in 2000 with "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire."

Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Richard Bernstein called Dr. Johnson's book a "take-no-prisoners tirade against what he portrays as classic imperial overextension worthy of Rome or the Ottoman Empire" and could be subjecting itself to retribution in which the 1993 "World Trade Center bombings and other anti-American terrorist acts may be just the beginning."

The review continued that Dr. Johnson had effectively issued "a useful and timely alert," but ultimately concluded the book was "marred by an overriding, sweeping and cranky one-sidedness."

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, however, Dr. Johnson's theories gained significant traction and "Blowback," became a bestseller.

As a graduate student studying international relations, I first became familiar with the trilogy of books exploring the imperial overreach of America and the declining status of America as a Democratic Republic. The three books, "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" (2000), "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" (2004) and "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic" (2006), hold even more significance as the United States faces trillion dollar deficits, and still unable to liquidate its imperial garrisons around the world.

Too unconventional for the infotainment news outlets, the prolific work done by Mr. Johnson on the transition of America from a republic to an empire will be a valuable primary source document for future historians in their study of the demise of the American Empire.

Literary Review of The American Way of War

Political engineering, frontloading, private contractors, and the disastrous rise of misplaced power in the executive branch of government, these are just some of the phrases and concepts that Eugene Jarecki introduces the reader to in his book, The American Way of War. Continuing to explore the subject of the military industrial complex that he based his 2005 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize-winning documentary "Why We Fight.", the author further explores the most under reported and discussed issues effecting America today.

While the book by Eugene Jarecki is an excellent print edition follow up to his 2005 film on the military industrial complex (MIC), the book falls a bit short in fully exploring the vast empire of bases the MIC possesses around the world or the probable involvement of the MIC in the September 11 “terrorist attack” in New York City and Washington D.C. Readers familiar with the gold standard work done by Chalmers Johnson in Blowback, Empire of Sorrows, and Nemesis, would agree with the aforementioned estimation.

As Rob Williams; editor, Vermont Commons newspaper writes in a Amazon book review of The American Way of War,

Speaking critically, as a U.S. historian and secessionist/ decentralist, my arguments with Jarecki's book are not insignificant. I find troubling his refusal to touch the mountain of evidence - the scholarly and well-researched work of David Ray Griffin or Michael Ruppert, for example - that suggests that the 9/11 attacks served as a "false flag" operation engineered by elements within the U.S. government to advance a "new Pearl Harbor." This is an odd omission, since this phrase is one he uses repeatedly in the book, quoting the Project For A New American Century's statement calling for a new "defensive" posture - one that essential advocates a policy of "full spectrum dominance" in which the U.S. militarizes the entire globe and outer space. (Orwell would be nodding knowingly right now.)

Perhaps prompting the aforementioned opinion by Mr. Williams was the lack of follow through by Jarecki on linking the 9/11 attacks and the talk of a “new Pearl Harbor” after Jarecki analyzes the Arthur McCollum memo in 1941 in the chapter, The Arsenal of Democracy. In the chapter, Jarecki appears to make a strong suggestion that Franklin D. Roosevelt used some of the tactics suggested in the eight-point memo by an officer serving in the Far Eastern section of the Office of Naval Intelligence to get the United States involved in World War II.

While Jarecki may falter in connecting the highly controversial and sensitive issues of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Jarecki adequately compensates for this in the chapter, The Missing “C”: An Insiders Guide to the Complex. One of the more interesting chapters in the book, The Missing “C” , Jarecki interviews Susan Eisenhower, the granddaughter of Dwight D Eisenhower, who reveals that the original configuration of the now famous phrase by Eisenhower had not been ‘military industrial complex’, but rather ‘military industrial congressional complex’.

In addition to interviewing Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Jarecki also interviews Franklin Spinney, a retired military officer who is considered one of the most recognized experts in defense cost overruns and how the defense industry operates. Any Tea Party supporter or conservative who reads the sub-chapters entitled, The Plans/reality MisMatch and Frontloading and Political Engineering, will see how badly corrupted and inefficient the defense industry is in America.

Although the book by Eugene Jarecki is not as polished as the books by Andrew Bacevich or filled with encyclopedia amounts of information like Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy of books, The American Way of War is still an excellent book for anyone wanting to learn the true reasons why the United States is a perpetual war.

The Reformation of the Jeffersonian Trinity

Since white landowning males founded the American republic in 1776, the American people have endorsed the Jeffersonian trinity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While more Americans over the last two centuries have been able to enjoy more liberty and participate in the political process through the 15th, 19th, and 26th amendments in the U.S. Constitution , today more Americans associate the Jeffersonian trinity to consumption, self-gratification and self-indulgence. Obsessed with a relentless personal quest to acquire, consume, and shed whatever confines that might interfere with those desires, most Americans have become oblivious of the ever-continuing decline in the civil liberties they enjoy and the quality of the democracy in their country.

The extensive media coverage of consumers standing in line for stores to open at 4 am in the morning, while the more important story of the government further increasing its power under the pretext of security, is an excellent example of how Americans equate their level of freedom and liberty through a quantitive perspective and not through a qualitative perspective.

In the book, Limits of Power- The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew Bacevich, the professor of international relations at Boston University identifies the Reagan administration and subsequent administrations as embracing a new ideology which put more emphasis on quantity in America instead of quality.

As Bacevich writes:

Whereas President Carter had summoned Americans to mend their ways, (because of the energy crisis of the 1970s) which implied a need for critical self-awareness, President Reagan obviated any need for soul searching by simply inviting his fellow citizens to carry on. For Carter, ending American dependence on foreign oil meant promoting moral renewal at home. Reagan- and Reagan’s successors- mimicked Carter in bemoaning the nation’s growing energy dependence. In practice, however, they did next to nothing to curtail that dependence. Instead, they wielded U.S. military power to ensure access to oil, hoping thereby to prolong the empire of consumption’s lease on life. Carter had portrayed quantity (the American preoccupation with what he called the “piling up of material goods”) as fundamentally at odds with quality (authentic freedom as he defined it). Reagan reconciled what was, to Carter, increasingly irreconcilable. In Reagan’s view, quality (advanced technology converted to military use by talented, highly skilled soldiers) could sustain quantity (a consumer economy based on the availability of cheap credit and cheap oil).

The reformation of the Jeffersonian trinity is evident when the media recently went from focusing on stories about new security procedures by the TSA and the forfeiture of some civil liberties, to news coverage of Americans buying consumer goods on Black Friday.

Perhaps it was no surprise that the government started the new contentious security procedures the same week as Black Friday.

Talking Turkey on Thanksgiving

As Americans celebrate the annual Thanksgiving Day holiday, the Grand Prince thought it would be a great time to talk about Turkey. Expanding on a previous article about the geo-political eastern drift of Turkey, it would be erroneous not to discuss the evolving relationships Turkey has with the European Union, her long time regional rival Greece, and the geo-political pragmatism of Turkey in Afghanistan. Whereas most of the lame stream media will be talking about Black Friday and other traditional stories related to Thanksgiving such as the annual Presidential pardon of a pair of turkeys from the butchers block, the Grand Prince will further illustrate and put into context the continuing geo-political ascension of the Republic of Turkey.

Perhaps the best way to begin to put the geo-political ascension of Turkey into context is to evoke the popular phrase; follow the money.

While the 2003 unilateralist attack on Iraq by the United States was widely unpopular with the Turkish population and prompted Turkey to reevaluate her affiliation with the United States, the 2008 global financial crisis created by the collapse of an American speculative finance bubble, further prompted Turkey to shift geo-politically towards the east and south. As Beppe Grillo pointed out in a recent blog posting,

as the G-6 countries (Germany, Italy, France, United States, Great Britain and Japan) prop up their ailing economies with deficit spending, the GDP of BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is about to be greater than the G6 countries. Further highlighting the changing shift of global economic power from the G-6 countries to the south and east, the BRIC countries have a very low public debt to GDP ratio: Russia 6%, China 18%, Brazil 45%, and India 59%.

Compare this to the United States, which has a 90 percent public debt to GDP ratio, it explains why Turkey is developing more of a relationship with the southern country of Brazil and the eastern country of China and not focusing as much attention on joining the EU economic bloc.

Greece and Turkey

In addition to the growing economic power of the BRIC countries, the recent economic demise of Greece, Turkey’s long time regional rival, is increasing the power of Ankara with the European Union and Greece. One interesting and severely under reported aspect of the Greek financial crisis is how Greece’s bloated defense spending, which is the highest in Europe in proportion to GDP, is now forcing Greece to improve its relationship with its traditional Aegean rival and shifting the regional balance of power towards Ankara.

While NATO recently unveiled a draft version of its 10 year strategic vision for the military alliance entitled, “Strategic Concept”, the 10 year strategic vision emphasized the need for NATO members to maintain defense spending at two percent of GDP, if the Alliance is to continue its effort in Afghanistan and deal with threats from terrorism and cyber warfare. Due to the 2008 financial crisis and the demise of the Soviet Union over 20 years ago, only six of NATO’s 26 European members are currently meeting their defense-spending target of two percent of GDP. Heavily indebted Greece and its rival Turkey are two of these countries. This fact highlights how the NATO military alliance has always been an offspring of the American military industrial congressional complex and has not been as unified and cohesive as most Americans have been led to believe.

Although the financial crisis in Greece is causing the government to institute a broad range of austerity measures and is influencing Greece to improve her relationship with Turkey, the Greek government has been vague as to how much the Greek military budget may be cut or what programs will be cut. Even though Germany was at first reluctant to back the financial bailout of Germany as a result of public outcry, several of the nations backing the bailout, including Germany, are also major suppliers to the Greek military. As Spyros Economides, senior lecturer on international relations at the London School of Economics declared after a presentation on the Greek financial crisis in May,

the military arms sales between Germany and Greece are often called offset agreements, but in the case of the German backed bailout to Greece, they are actually offside agreements. Economides expanded on this by declaring, “They really undermine the whole process, if you give with one hand and take with the other in this kind of crisis.”

It was reported that during the 110-billion-euro bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund that France pushed Greece to buy six French built frigates, 15 helicopters and up to 40 top-of-the-range Rafale fighter aircraft. The pressure by French President Sarkozy underscores how government leaders are sometimes nothing more than puppets to their corporate masters and how military spending is a textbook example of crony capitalism and corporate welfare.

The insistence of French President Sarkozy for Greece to buy French built frigates and the change of attitude by German Prime Minister Merkel, in spite of widespread public opposition to the financial bailout of Greece, is hampering Greek officials to give Turkey’s new “zero problems” approach to foreign policy the recognition and respect Ankara was seeking. Due to the unneeded and expensive naval assets Greece is being pressured to buy from French and German defense firms, the arms purchases by Greece will cause Turkey to match the arms purchases, further continuing a decades old arms race between the two Aegean Sea rivals.

In a possible retaliation to both Greek and European Union influenced military spending, Turkey may have allowed refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan and several African countries to penetrate the European Union border through a 7-mile porous river and land border between Turkey and Greece. The breach in the border was so bad in the summer and early fall that the European Union authorized the deployment of armed European guards be dispatched to Greece to patrol the country's border with Turkey in an attempt to stem steeply increasing illegal immigration into Europe.

The deployment of the Rapid Intervention Border Teams, assembled from the border guard forces of other European countries, will be the first time Brussels has deployed multinational-armed units on the EU's external land border. While the surge in illegal immigrants is seen by some analysts as the result of the closure of Mediterranean migration and trafficking routes into Spain, Italy, and Malta through sea patrols, Bulgaria, which has a longer land border with Turkey than Greece, has not detected a substantial increase in illegal immigrants seeking entry into the EU.

The recent deployment of European Union Rapid Intervention Border Teams on the border with two NATO countries, underscore how extraneous and outmoded the 61 year old military alliance has become in the ever changing 21st century.

Turkey, Afghanistan and the United States

While Turkey and other NATO countries may be contributing forces to NATO’s International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, a critical analysis of the 2,230 ISAF deaths in Afghanistan reveal how countries with more conservative governments and countries wanting to join NATO have substantially higher casualties than Turkey.


Even though Turkey has the second largest standing force in NATO, since joining the ISAF campaign in 2003, Turkey has limited its participation in Afghanistan to only a non-combative support role. In contrast, Greece does not have any NATO troops in Afghanistan supporting the ISAF mission. This is due in large part to the high amount of anti-American sentiment among the Greek population as a result of American support for the military coup by Greek colonels in 1967.

The often-unreported internal fragmentation within NATO, in addition to the United States trying to use military force to suppress an armed insurgency, explains why the American led NATO operation in Afghanistan is now longer than the involvement of the Soviets in the 1980s. Perhaps a recent Associated Press article sums up the quagmire, in which Afghanistan has become with the following phrase from the article.

The Soviet Union could not win in Afghanistan, and now the United States is about to have something in common with that futile campaign: nine years, 50 days.

Heavily influenced by the domestic political pressures of the military industrial congressional complex, in addition to the overconfidence and pride associated with imperial hubris, the United States led NATO mission in Afghanistan is doomed to failure. Instead of continuing to use military force to try to win the hearts and minds of Afghani citizens, the United States should start employing some of the soft power tactics that the Republic of Turkey has used in Afghanistan, due to the unique and special relationship Turkey has with Afghanistan

The unique and special relationship Turkey has with Afghanistan was recounted in a brilliant Christian Science Monitor article entitled; How Turkey can help NATO in Afghanistan.

Written by Aydemir Erman, who was Turkey’s special coordinator for Afghanistan from 1991 to 2003, Mr. Erman remained involved as an adviser in Afghanistan until his retirement from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2009. The article by Mr. Erman is an appropriate way of summarizing the continuing geo-political ascension of the Republic of Turkey and why the United States should follow some of the soft power examples offered by Turkey.

Turks have aided the Afghan government and its people since the days of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, the “Iron Amir” who unified the country during his reign from 1880 to 1901 and embarked on a path of modernization. Afghanistan was the second country to recognize modern Turkey in 1921 after the USSR. Modern Turkey was instrumental in establishing the military academy, medical school, Kabul University and its faculty of political sciences, the music conservatory, and the public health service of Afghanistan.

Good relations between Turks and Afghans are based on three factors:

First, we do not share a common border and thus have no disputes on that score.

Second, as a young republic that was a successor to a great empire, Turkey never displayed any imperial overtones as it embraced the young Afghan nation, which had suffered at the hands of the British and Russian empires, after independence. Undergoing its own process of modernization at the time, Turkey treated Afghanistan as an absolute equal. We never had a special agenda and had relations with all elements of the Afghan nation.

Third, we share the religion of Islam.

As a NATO ally true to its obligations, Turkey sent troops to Afghanistan after 9/11 on the condition that they would not take part in combat operations. Despite pressure from allies, Turkey sticks strictly to this policy. Our presence in Afghanistan, both military and civilian, has been based on treating people with respect and as equals, not with paternalism or the imperial arrogance of an occupying power.

Turkish troops deployed to Kabul have been under strict orders to treat Afghans with dignity. They have not broken into homes. Most patrols are conducted on foot and not in armored carriers. Troops wear no sunglasses in order to maintain eye contact. Touching women is totally taboo. Medical personnel serve Afghan people as well as their own forces. Turkish troops have thus not only contributed to the security of Kabul but became an unobtrusive part of Afghan daily life.

President Karzai made a point at the London Conference of stressing Turkey’s mediating role, following upon the “trilateral” Turkey-Afghanistan-Pakistan meeting he had earlier attended in January in Istanbul with Pakistani President Asif Zardari. Unfortunately, India’s absence so far in this process has weakened the Turkish initiative. It is critical to get them on board because the Afghan problem cannot be solved unless India and Pakistan come to terms over their interests in Afghanistan.

The international community in general, and the allies in particular, should lend their support to Turkey.

Turkey’s NATO membership and historical soft-power capacity can make a critical difference in Afghanistan. Those who know and are trusted historically by the Afghan people can show the way for those who truly want to help the Afghans stand on their own feet.

If NATO sticks to a clear mandate within a defined time frame for withdrawal and the international community allocates sufficient resources, Afghanistan can be brought back into the fold of the international community. Turkey helped them join the world when Afghanistan was a young nation. It can do so again today.

Learning to Fly

Dedicated to all the news coverage about the TSA and the "enhanced patdown".



As the video highlights, passengers have more to worry about the ground crews and the unscreened luggage in the cargo hold, than they do about some "terrorist" with a bomb in his pants.

Turkey Looks to the East for its Future

The press coverage of the recent NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal makes it appear that the 27 member military coalition is unified and is still heavily influenced and controlled by the military and economic power of the United States. However, a judicious review of the 61 year old intergovernmental military alliance reveal that some members states are beginning to openly reveal their recognition of China as the next world superpower. Perhaps no greater example of China’s ever-growing economic power was the recent decision by the Turkish government, NATO’s second largest standing military force, to hold its annual Anatolian Eagle military exercise not with the United States and Israel as it had done from 2001 to 2008, but with the China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).

Although most Americans have been shielded from the news bulletin of Turkey holding a military exercise with China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), the information reveals the dangers of maintaining a Cold War military alliance in the ever changing 21st century. Unable to disband NATO after the end of the Cold War in 1989 due to the political power of the military industrial congressional complex in America the foreign military alliance of the Cold War era is obsolete, outdated and is undermining American national security. An in-depth analysis of Turkey, a country with the world’s 4th largest military and NATO’s second largest standing military force, reveals how outdated and obsolete the Cold War era military alliance has become.

Turkey and NATO during the Cold War


Considered a strategic NATO ally, Turkey has benefited from a U.S. policy that is long on military assistance and short on constructive criticism. From the beginning of Turkey’s membership in NATO, largely a political victory against the Soviet Union, the United States has had to walk a fine line between advocating democracy and human rights to the world, while allowing Turkey to discriminate against its Kurdish minority population and tolerate Turkey being ruled by a military coup during the 1980s.

Due to Great Britain no longer able to supply economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey, the United States and the Truman Administration decided to support Greece and Turkey so they would not fall under the sphere of Soviet influence. This led to the decision to provide Turkey with Marshall Aid resources in 1947 and eventual NATO membership in 1952. The new geo-political importance of Turkey allowed both of the leaders of Ankara and Washington to benefit from the military and economic alliances. Ankara benefited by being able to continue their repressive policy towards the Kurds, while the United States benefited by having an ally in the Cold War and by acquiring a strategic location for its military and intelligence gathering operations on the Soviet Union.

While the United States never publicly lectured Ankara on its treatment of its Kurdish ethnic monitory population, the Johnson administration did send a letter in 1964 questioning some of the actions by the Turkish government. Similar to the two-faced American support for Turkey during the Cold War, the spurious justification for NATO during the Cold War to protect Western European countries from communism was a mockery considering that over a quarter of the Italian population up until 1978 voted for the Partito Comunista Italiano (Communist Party of Italy).

Due to Cold War politics, the United States Congress, along with a grateful military industrial complex, approved the sale of billions of dollars of military equipment to Turkey. In reality though the Soviet Union was the least of Turkey’s worries and instead, Turkey used the arms sale from the United States to build up its military to challenge its long time Aegean foe Greece on its western border and to help suppress the Kurdish rebellion on its eastern border. By turning a blind eye to Turkish human rights abuses in the Kurdistan region and Turkey’s 1974 military invasion of Cyprus, the United States saw Turkey both as a secular state with a predominately Muslim population and as a buffer between Europe and the Middle East.

The 1980 Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement between the United States and Turkey had the goal of achieving political influence in Turkey through military arms purchases and economic cooperation. The agreement allowed the U.S. to build military bases on Turkish soil; in exchange for helping to modernize Turkey’s military. In addition to gaining political influence with the country, the agreement also increased the power of the Turkish military, which is widely known to be highly secular and is often referred to as the "inner state". Unlike the United States, where the president is commander in chief of the armed forces, in Turkey, the military is not clearly controlled by civilian leaders. Long seen as the founder of the republic, guardian of the regime, and the guardian of secularism, the 1980 Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement with the United States greatly influenced the power of the Turkish military.

The 1980 Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement opened the door to a flood of U.S. arms transfers, and since 1980, the U.S. has shipped $9 billion worth of arms to Turkey and provided $6.5 billion in grant and loan military aid to purchase U.S. equipment. Put more directly, American defense corporations like United Technologies, Boeing, and Grumman were able to sell their weapons to the Turks and the American taxpayer would subsidize the sale. A textbook example of corporate welfare. The corporate welfare continued until 1999, when Congress finally phased out this type of military aid to both Greece and Turkey out of a recognition that these relatively well-off states could finance their own arms purchases. Before FY 1999, Turkey had been the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid.

Turkey and China

Once valued as a deterrent to the Soviet threat, after the end of the Cold War, Turkey is now considered a key ally by the United States in stopping terrorism, drug trafficking, and Islamic fundamentalism from seeping across the Bosporus Straits. During the 1990s and 2000s, Turkey was used by Washington political leaders acting on behalf of American petroleum interests as a pipeline route from the Caspian Sea region, avoiding and isolating an oil and natural gas pipeline route through Iran. During this time, Turkey also won U.S. favor by supporting the 1991 Gulf War, participating in Bosnian peacekeeping operation, and providing a base for U.S. fighter planes monitoring the "no-fly-zone" in northern Iraq.

In 2003 however, the geo-political tectonic plates began to grind ever slowly towards the east with the election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a leader with a background of political Islam and a leader with an agenda of bringing Turkey into the European Union. The unilateralist decision of the United States to attack Iraq put Turkey is a very awkward situation. While the United States believed that it decades long military support of Turkey would gain it the right to launch the U.S. 4th Infantry Division from Turkey and be part of a pincer movement on Saddam Hussein's regime, it appears that Erdogan and the new leaders of Turkey were more concerned about appeasing leaders of the European Union, who were not supporters of the Iraq War, and a economic bloc Turkey was aspiring to join.

As the 2003 attack on Iraq by the United States has proven to be one of biggest mistakes in American foreign policy, the recent eastern drift of Turkey away from Washington and Brussels reflects the changing regional politics of the Middle East, a cooling of relations with Israel, one of Turkey’s strongest allies in the region and the diminishing power of the Turkish military in domestic affairs. As Arnaud de Borchgrave, a member of the Atlantic Council recently wrote:

Erdogan no longer sees Turkey's role in NATO as a priority. And to make sure there was no possibility of the country's military staging what would be a fifth coup since 1960, a group of 52 military commanders were arrested last February. They were allegedly planning to blow up mosques as a signal for the military to overthrow the Islamic-oriented government.

Supported by a robust and growing economy, Turkey’s economy is expected to grow by 10.3 percent in 2010. This increase, which matched China’s as the fastest growing economy in 2010 among the Group of 20 major economies, is enabling Turkey sustain a 10-year military modernization and revitalization plan. The strong economy in addition to the recent problems affecting the Euro, have influenced Turkey to begin to look towards China for its long-term economic development. As a recent New York Times article highlighted, the decision by Turkey to look to China instead of Europe for long-term economic growth also compliments

China’s broad, strategic push into Europe. It is snapping up assets depressed by the global financial crisis and becoming a significant partner of other hard-hit European nations. Ultimately, analysts say, Beijing hopes to achieve not just more business for its own companies, but also greater influence over the economic policies set in the power corridors of Brussels and Germany.

Turkey, Iran, and Israel


Further complicating matters for leaders in Washington and Brussels is the recent warming of relations between Ankara and the Islamic Republic of Iran and the strained relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv. While most mainstream political pundits will scrutinize the warming of relations between Iran and Turkey from the Islamic point of view, a more astute and balanced analysis would look at the relations of the two countries from the natural resource and energy point of view. Currently Turkey is heavily dependant on Russia for its natural gas energy and it is a rational move by Turkey to look to Iran to diversify its sources of energy. The recent diplomatic move by the Erdogan government to persuade Iran to suspend its secret nuclear weapons program was an example of the more independent regional role Turkey is assuming in the region.

Another sign of the tectonic shift of Turkey away from the west and the changing dynamics of the Middle East, is the recent deterioration of diplomatic relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv. While Turkey was the only Muslim country to recognize Israel, and a close military alliance between the two countries was so strong that the Israeli air force could use Turkish air space for training and for an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear installations, the Israeli invasion of Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 which killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis quickly eroded relations between the two countries. Making international headlines in January 2009 during the Davos World Economic Forum, Mr. Erdogan walked out of a discussion after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, on the Israeli military offensive in Gaza. Further damaging relations between the two countries was the Israeli commando attack on a flotilla of Turkish vessels bound for Gaza with relief supplies. Making matters worse, Israel branded the civilians onboard the flotilla as activists in the Islamic group Insani Yardim Vakfi, on par with al-Qaida. This accusation did not go over very well with Turkey as the group is a key supporter of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party.

Contrary to the fears of most Americans, the close relations that Ankara is developing with China and other regional governments in the area such as Tehran and Damascus can actually be beneficial for America in the long run. Unfortunately, due to the immense political and financial power of the military industrial congressional complex in America, leaders in Washington and Brussels will look at the world from behind their fortified bureaucratic compounds, while China gains more political power in the world through economic cooperation and development deals.

Perhaps Arnaud de Borchgrave, a member of the Atlantic Council, and a senior fellow at the conservative leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies, put it best when he recently wrote:

One cynical Turkish ex-foreign minister, speculating about the Afghan war, confided, "The way things are going, your Congress will have made Afghanistan secure for China to make a deal with a new Taliban regime to exploit the $3 trillion worth of minerals verified by U.S. intelligence."

Turkish officials who see the global balance of power trending eastward can also see over the horizon a great Turkic nation that spans most of central Asia. For them, this is a more exciting vista than a slow NATO retreat from Afghanistan. Or a European Union, where Turkey's nemesis Greece, the sick man of Europe, almost collapsed the painfully erected House of Europe.

Taking Aim at Kids

With hundreds of cable channels filling the airwaves, the comedy show Infomania, sifts through all the garbage and highlights some of the most stupid shows.

Recently, Conor Knighton and the crew had took aim, excuse the pun, at hunting shows. For people not used to seeing animals being shot with a pistol, you may not want to view this video.

Perpetual War in Afghanistan

The Afghanistan War is the longest war in United States history.

Although there may be some public debate over the tactics and methods the Obama administration may be pursuing in its execution of the Afghan war, it is largely agreed upon by many anti-imperial scholars such as Andrew Bacevich, that John McCain would most likely have pursued the same course of action in Afghanistan.

Allowed to continue due to political pressure from security and defense corporations that have a vested interest in the never-ending conflict in Afghanistan, after nine years, 1,100 American deaths, and over 338 billion dollars, there is no public debate over ending the war in Afghanistan. Instead, the The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama's pledge that he'd begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011. This public relations blitz by the Obama administration is another chilling example of the enormous power the Pentagon and the national security state apparatus have within Washington DC.

As reported by the Christian Science Monitor,

Senior US military officials are increasingly deemphasizing the July 2011 deadline set by President Obama earlier this year for beginning US troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, instead talking up a 2014 date cited by President Hamid Karzai as the year he would like Afghans to take over their own security throughout the country.

Although this may sound like US military forces may withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, do not count on it. It merely means that the US forces will withdraw to huge sprawling military bases like Kandahar Air Force Base, which is so large it has nine separate bus routes operating within the base. While US cities are cutting public mass transit budgets, military bases like Camp Anacanda in Iraq or Kandahar Air Force Base are see double digit budget increases in their mass transit budgets. After nearly a decade of war, close to 700 U.S., allied, and Afghan military bases dot Afghanistan. Moreover, if history is any clue like the bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea -- once built, these bases have a tendency toward permanency that a cessation of hostilities, or even outright peace, has a way of not altering.

Just like during the Cold War, when negative stories about American allies were downplayed, like 25 percent of Italians voting for the Communist Party of Italy even though the US was supposed to be fighting the spread of Communism , the suppression of negative news stories associated with the Afghanistan government are being downplayed. Some of the more embarrassing stories related to the Afghanistan government include allies of Afghan President Hamid Karzai stealing millions of dollars from Kabul Bank, and corruption charges surrounding the last two elections in Afghanistan.

Instead of discussing if the Bush era tax cuts should expire, which they should, members of Congress should be discussing how to end wasting billions of taxpayers dollars in Afghanistan. According to recent information posted by Nick Turse, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and an award-winning journalist,

Between 2001 and 2009, according to the Afghan government, the country has received $36 billion in grants and loans from donor nations, with the United States disbursing some $23 billion of it. U.S. taxpayers have anted up another $338 billion to fund the war and occupation. Yet from poverty indexes to risk-of-rape assessments, from childhood mortality figures to drug-use stats, just about every available measure of Afghan wellbeing paints a grim picture of a country in a persistent state of humanitarian crisis, often involving reconstruction and military failures on an epic scale. Pick a measurement affecting ordinary Afghans and the record since November 2001 when Kabul fell to Allied forces is likely to show stagnation or setbacks and, almost invariably, suffering.

The basic safety of women in Afghanistan in, and well beyond, Taliban-controlled areas has in recent years proven a dismal subject even though the Americans haven’t left. According to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), for instance, 87% of women are subject to domestic abuse. A 2009 report by the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) found that rape “is an everyday occurrence in all parts of the country” and called it a “human rights problem of profound proportions.” That report continued:

"Women and girls are at risk of rape in their homes and in their communities, in detention facilities and as a result of traditional harmful practices to resolve feuds within the family or community... In the northern region for example, 39 percent of the cases analyzed by UNAMA Human Rights, found that perpetrators were directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation."

Afghan women are reportedly turning to suicide as their only solution.

A June report by Sudabah Afzali of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting noted that, according to officials in Herat Province, “cases of suicide amongst women… have increased by 50 per cent over the last year.” Sayed Naim Alemi, the director of the regional hospital in Herat, noted that 85 cases of attempted suicide recorded in the previous six months had involved women setting themselves on fire or ingesting poison. In 57 of the cases, the women had died.

While the United States led mission to Afghanistan appears to be have failed at every social and humanitarian level, according a recent speech by U.S. General Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson, the one category the United States is excelling in Afghanistan is the killing of “militants” and “enemy combatants”. As reported by the Christian Science Monitor,

The director of the Pentagon’s Pakistan/Afghanistan Coordination Cell, Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson, said at an Army symposium in October that he believes it would be possible for Afghans to take over security responsibilities in their country “by the end of 2014.” He also noted that strikes by US special operations forces are continuing at an “unprecedented” pace with “a tremendous amount of success.”

“Every 24 hours, on average, we’re killing or capturing three to five midlevel enemy leaders and 24 enemy fighters,” Nicholson said. This, in turn, has “lowered the average age of enemy leadership because they’re getting killed so quickly. It’s severely disrupting their command and control in country.”

The statement by the Pentagon’s Pakistan/Afghanistan Coordination Cell, Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, appears to contradict everything that about the Afghan security forces needing until 2014 to secure their own country as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai declare.

Understanding the dubious character of Hamid Karzai and the impartial viewpoint of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the opinion of Brig. General John Nicholson appears to be the more credible analysis of the security situation in Afghanistan.

The Perpetual War in Afghanistan will continue not for the reasons given by corrupt politicians like Hamid Karzai or the politicians who protect them such as Sec of Defense Robert Gates , but to give all the people profiting from this unjust war another four years to become more wealthier.

How the CIA Undermines American National Security

The day before the 2010 mid-term election, the Associated Press released a story about 16 CIA officers receiving administrative punishment for their role in Peru's 2001 shoot down of a plane that killed American missionary Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter. Although it was later found that the plane was not carrying drugs, as it was suspected of doing, the killing of two innocent American citizens on flawed information supplied by the CIA is another chilling illustration of the almost habitually incompetence of an agency entrusted to protect American citizens. Perhaps former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson in Dismantling the Empire, best sums up the decades of failures by the Central Intelligence Agency by declaring, “an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all”.

The analysis submitted by Chalmers Johnson is persuasive when considering the numerous failures the Central Intelligence Agency has had over the last 60 years. As systematically detailed by Chalmers Johnson in the chapter entitled Agency of Rogues in the aforementioned book, and aided a great deal by the research done by New York Times correspondent Tim Wiener is his book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, the historical record of CIA failure is unequivocal.

Beginning with Korean War where the CIA dropped 212 foreign agents into Manchuria, and within a short period of time, over a hundred agents were killed or captured, the CIA has repeatedly demonstrated that it is no good at executing clandestine operations, and its operatives never have enough linguistic or cultural knowledge of target countries. This was particularly evident shortly following the Korean War when the CIA was played for suckers by Soviet KGB agents, who had wiped out a Polish underground movement the CIA thought still existed and turned the former Polish underground supporters into double agents. After five years of planning, millions of dollars’ worth of gold bars, arms, and two-way radios, did the CIA begin to find out that they were played. Adding salt to the proverbial wound, it would later be discovered that a good portion of the CIA’s money was sent to the Communist Party in Italy.

Johnson makes a powerful statement against the incompetence of the CIA when he writes:

The story (of incompetence) would prove unending. On February 21, 1994, the agency finally discovered and arrested Aldrich Ames, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe, who had been spying for the USSR for seven years and had sent innumerable U.S. agents before the KGB firing squads. Wiener, the author of Legacy of Ashes comments, “The Ames case revealed an institutional carelessness that bordered on criminal negligence”.

Although the CIA continued to fail in almost every operation it undertook ranging from the 1961 Bay of Pigs Operation to the failure to prevent the surprise attack on 9/11 by al-Qaeda operatives , when it did marginally succeed in operations such as the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran or the 1973 overthrow of President Salvador Allende in Chile, the few successful CIA operations produced negative long term consequences for American national security. Perhaps no greater example of the abject and miserable failure of the CIA was the inability to prevent al-Qaeda operatives from launching a surprise attack within the United States on September 11, 2001.

Following the total failure of the CIA in 2001, the CIA further discredited itself during the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the CIA failed to correctly analyze if Saddam Hussein had any nuclear or biological weapons. Although the French intelligence service had cultivated a source within the Iraqi government, Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, who had passed on information to French intelligence that Saddam Hussein had no active WMD programs and this information was passed onto the CIA, the CIA still had no ability to analyze accurately what little intelligence it had. As recounted by Tim Wiener in Legacy of Ashes, “

Under [CIA Director George Tenat’s] leadership, the agency produced the worst body of work in its long history: a special national intelligence estimate titled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

The flawed CIA assessment of Iraq pursuing and continuing programs for weapons of mass destruction, contributed President Bush’s decision to launch a preemptive military attack on Iraq, with the sole aim of instituted a change of regime. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the latest tragic example of America’s abysmally record of trying to determine how other people should govern themselves. Chalmers Johnson in the chapter Agency of Rogues writes,

The CIA’s secret support for fascists (e.g. Greece under George Papadopoulos), militarists (e.g. Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet), and murderers (e.g. the Congo under Mabuto Sese Seko); its uncritical support of death squads (El Salvador) and religious fanatics (Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan) - all these and more activities combined to pepper the world with blowback movements against the United States.

Most Americans remain oblivious to the corrupt and undemocratic practices of the CIA or know what the approximately 17,000 employees do with the yearly $ 44 to $ 48 billion spent on “intelligence”. In a time of trillion dollar deficits and anti big government rhetoric increasing from both ends of the political spectrum, it is time more Americans become more educated and aware to how having an incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all.

One Party Democracy in America

Although Il Principe is no fan of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman due to his indifferent attitude towards the Palestinian people or his unwillingness to use his popularity to talk about the military industrial congressional complex, Thomas Friedman however understands geo-economics and the continuing shift of power to Asia in the 21st century.

In a very good article Friedman published on September 9, 20009 entitled Our One-Party Democracy; Friedman offers a powerful critique of the most fundamental problem affecting the American political process, the inability of American politicians to put party differences aside for the good of the country. In the article, Friedman writes:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

Look at the climate/energy bill that came out of the House. Its sponsors had to work twice as hard to produce this breakthrough cap-and-trade legislation. Why? Because with basically no G.O.P. representatives willing to vote for any price on carbon that would stimulate investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, the sponsors had to rely entirely on Democrats — and that meant paying off coal-state and agriculture Democrats with pork.

In another words, both republicans and democrats in America are trapped within an antiquated status quo system and care more about taking care of the interests of the people and organizations that have given them money, than they do about the interests of the people who cannot or will not contribute to their campaigns. This is unmistakably evident in the Afghanistan war continuing, even though over 60 percent of Americans no longer support or believe the war should continue.

SNL on the G20

A great parody on real events.

Chinese Workers Build 15 story Hotel in 6 Days

Using prefabricated materials, Chinese workers in the south-central Chinese city of Changsh completed a hotel construction project in just six days. As the Yahoo blog, the Upshot wrote, If nothing else, this remarkable achievement will stoke further complaints from American economic pundits that China's economy is far more accomplished than ours in tending to such basics as construction.

In addition to the small amount of time the hotel took to build, the hotel is made of soundproofed and thermal-insulated materials designed to withstand a magnitude 9 earthquake.

The Civilian Economy Suffers in America while the MICC Thrives

Failing to get a free-trade agreement with the host nation South Korea and only able to muster lackluster international support for America’s get-tough policy with China on trade and currency disputes, the declining economic power status of the United States could not be more evident. Although most of the media in America will echo the rhetoric espoused by Washington D.C. political leaders and try to blame the poor performance of the U.S. economy on the developing nation of China, a more sensible analysis and discussion would instead focus on an issue the press is unwilling or powerless to address, the growing contradiction between the needs of America’s civilian economy and the demands of America’s military industrial congressional complex.

Instead of echoing the message of Washington politicians, who are beholden to the interests of people associated with the status quo, it is time the main stream media in America begin to act more independent and talk frankly about the real issues undermining the U.S. economy. Perhaps one of the most important issues that is not receiving enough attention of the mainstream press is the financial pressure caused by America’s massive indebtedness due to the decision by President Bush and a republican controlled Congress to start two wars, while at the same time cutting taxes to the wealthiest people in America. While Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives as a result of the current federal deficit, the republican controlled House of Representatives between 2001 and 2006 increased the national debt over six trillion dollars.

A significant portion of that six trillion dollars of public debt is directly attributed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon’s ever growing budget. As Chalmers Johnson writes in Dismantling the Empire,

the growing contradiction between the needs of America’s civilian economy and its military industrial complex, and America’s dependence on a volunteer army and innumerable private contractors strongly indicate an empire built on fragile foundations.

A good example of the growing contradiction between the needs of America’s civilian economy and its military industrial complex that Chalmers Johnson speaks about is reflected in the amount of money the government spends on transportation and other related infrastructure projects for the civilian economy compared to the amount of money the government spends on the military.

One of the last great patriots in American history, Dwight D. Eisenhower, tried to warn the American people as far back as 1953 during his first 100 days in office to the dangers associated with diverting national resources and other priorities disproportionately towards national security.

In a speech known as the “Chance for Peace” given to The American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953, he asserted that the Soviet Union was spending vast amounts of on military weapons and it was causing the United States to follow suit. Eisenhower declared that for whatever the reasons behind the arms race, it was diverting national resources and other priorities disproportionately towards military weapons. In the “Chance for Peace” speech Eisenhower declared,

“Every gun is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genesis of its scientists, the hopes of its children”.

In a similar speech to the one he gave during his first 100 days as President, Dwight D. Eisenhower continued to warn the American people about the growing power of a military industrial complex all the way to his final days in office. In his Farewell Address to Congress, Eisenhower declared:

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brink schoolhouse in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with the homes that could have housed 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

In addition to undermining American democracy at home, the power of the military industrial congressional complex and the national security state apparatus also undermines America’s long-term economic interests. The recent failure of the United States to get a free-trade agreement with South Korea for the American auto industry may reflect a government who has not forgiven the United States for supporting previous South Korean military dictators like General Park Chung Hee and Major General Chun Doo Hwan. On the other hand, the refusal to open up its auto market to the American auto industry may only represent a government unwilling to change its macroeconomic policy of mercantilism.

Although, it is well known that South Korean President Lee Mung-bak is pro-American and a tentative trade deal was signed by the Bush Administration , the trade deal has languished in Washington as lawmakers complained about Korean barriers to exports of U.S. autos and beef. Ford Motor Co. and the United Auto Workers opposed the agreement and sought changes.

As noted by some analysts,

Without a Korea deal, other nations “won’t believe the United States has the political will to complete and pass an agreement,” Ernest Bower, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Southeast Asia Program, wrote in a note yesterday. It’s “the acid test for whether the United States can return to a leadership position on trade.”

The failure of the United States to gain a free trade agreement with South Korea is perhaps the most convincing example of the demise of American power in the region.

In a time when America is facing trillion dollar deficits and senior citizens are told there will be no cost of living adjustments in their social security payments, it is disquieting to note that there is no political discussion to close any of the military bases in South Korea. The failure of the Obama administration to threaten to close any of the military bases in South Korea, which contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to the South Korean economy each year and stokes geo-political tensions in the region, is proving that the needs of the needs of the military industrial congressional complex, out weigh the needs of America’s civilian economy and its workforce.