The Cost of Empire (11min.)

[LargoWinch]

As a bonus (;)), I am also embedding a clip about the war in Afghanistan, which Canada is involved. That clip, is less entertaining than the first one (top one), but its content is just as good if not superior.
-W.

[D-Mack]

Re: The Cost of Empire (11min.)

It's clear that if they wanted to they could rebuild the country, there is no military solution.



But building countries up, like they did with Germany or Japan isn't longer policy it seems.

It's more back to the stone age as seen in Gulf War 1

We never learned that the government's goals had changed from expelling Saddam's forces from Kuwait to destroying Iraq's infrastructure. Or what a country with a destroyed infrastructure looks like -- with most of its electricity, telecommunications, sewage system, dams, railroads and bridges blown away.
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/12...s/?page=entire

They wanted to go to Afghanistan, the question is why. Controlling the region and denying or controlling resources is probably the main reason.
China is probably the main candidate and its true that Pakistan seems to be close to China, I wonder if the terrorists the US advised to to stage bombings in Iran are now involved in kidnapping those Chinese in Baluchistan.
It looks like it's going to be a never ending war.

ABC News Exclusive: The Secret War Against Iran

April 03, 2007 5:25 PM

A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News.

The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran.

..
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/...ws_exclus.html

US 'planned attack on Taleban'

By the BBC's George Arney

A former Pakistani diplomat has told the BBC that the US was planning military action against Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban even before last week's attacks.

Niaz Naik, a former Pakistani Foreign Secretary, was told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October.

...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1550366.stm

October 1997: Brzezinski Highlights the Importance of Central Asia to Achieving World Domination

Zbigniew Brzezinski. [Source: USIS, American Embassy]
Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publishes a book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, in which he portrays the Eurasian landmass as the key to world power, and Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia. He states that for the US to maintain its global primacy, it must prevent any possible adversary from controlling that region. He notes: “The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” He predicts that because of popular resistance to US military expansionism, his ambitious Central Asian strategy can not be implemented, “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” [Brzezinski, 1997, pp. 24-25, 210-11] The book also theorizes that the US could be attacked by Afghan terrorists, precipitating a US invasion of Afghanistan, and that the US may eventually seek control of Iran as a key strategic element in the US’s attempt to exert its influence in Central Asia and the Middle

http://www.historycommons.org/contex...1097chessboard