Blown Up by Blowback

“We have met the enemy and he is us” -Pogo.

Mussolini predicted the rise of the Fourth Reich when business and the state became indistinguishable. Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder was one of the first geniuses in privatization of war ordering a fleet of aircraft to bomb his own American camp in Joseph Heller's novel Catch 22. So I wasn't surprised to see the news this morning was reporting that an Army helicopter crash in Iraq was most likely the victim of a shoot down using a stinger missile. They found an expended tube near the crash.

For those of you with HDD (History Deficit Disorder) A stinger is an American weapon which the US transferred in quantity to Osama bin Laden and his Mujahideen when we wanted them to shoot down Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. The stinger proved to be deadly effective and served as the magic bullet that ultimately sent the Russians packing.

In the late summer of 1983 I found myself in one of the five camps that George H. Bush, head of the CIA recruited Osama to run near Torquam, in the company of two Afghani medical students. I witnessed a piece the massive hardware transfer from the largest CIA covert action in history in support of the Mujahideen described in George Crile’s book Charley Wilson’s War.

The vacuum left behind by the departure of the Russians was filled by the Taliban, who under the tutelage of the Pakistani ISI gratefully accepted $175 million dollars each over a period of seven years from the US government. Investments that helped train and fund our current enemy in Afghanistan.

Word from Afghanistan is that parts for the Unocal’s pipeline are being flown in on C-130s which land on new concrete in Kandahar in Kabul laid down by concrete plants jointly owned by the Bushes and the Bin Laden Group. Since poppy production was up 7000% year on year, the CIA is enjoying a bumper crop of profits filling the empty C130s with tons of heroin and shipping it worldwide. Who knows, maybe they are using the funds to fuel their Premier Executive Transport planes conducting extraordinary rendition worldwide. It looks like a win-win for business and government.

Hopefully this will provide them with the necessary funds to try to overturn the resource nationalists who were democratically elected in Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Palestine and anywhere else that we feel that the leadership isn’t sympathetic to the needs of the shareholders of our multinational corporations or our terrorist client state Israel.

Our support for the extremists has led to the confluence of the interests of the NeoCons, Zionists, and Mullahs which seem to trump the interests of the other 6 billion people on the planet.

My question is who fired the missile? Shi'ia? Sunni? Kurds? Iranians? Or perhaps a CIA/MI6/Mossad funded and trained former Mujahideen/Taliban figher.

The answer may be contained in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars: The CIA provided the Islamic warriors in Afghanistan with enough explosives to blow up half of New York (page 135), and with over 2000 Stinger missiles, 600 of which appear to remain in the hands of anti-US forces today, possibly including a number shipped to Iran for re-purposing. So maybe the shoot down was the result of a re-purposed stinger.

This question brings to mind a passage from Aeschylus:

So in the Libyan fable it is told

That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,

Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,

"With our own feathers, not by others' hands,

Are we now smitten."

In reviewing history there is little or no history of Islamic terrorism before the US, UK and Israelis undertook the task of arming and training the likes of the Mujahideen and Hamas. So if we don’t like terrorists, maybe it it time for us to stop arming and training them. But then what would we do the Global War on Terror? How could we fatten President Cheney's Halliburton stock options without it?

Huxley, Orwell and Vonnegut all warned my of our current circumstances. Historians compare the current Imperial US to Rome perhaps because comparisons to the British Empire is too close to home. In reality we are facing the eclipse of the Anglo/American Axis of Aggression which includes the U S's terrorist client state, Israel

Our current Energyo-fascism is indicative of the twilight of an arrogant, ignorant leadership deaf to the voice of the citizens, the congress and the bi-partisan ISG.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/collapse-of-bush-presidency-poses.html

A very perceptive and chilling comment on the psychology of the current Presidency, if you have not already seen it.

“The reason Bush violated the law when eavesdropping is the same reason Lithwick cites to explain his other lawless and extremist measures — because he wanted purposely not to comply with the law in order to establish the general “principle” that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law. This is a President and an administration that are obsessed first and foremost with their own power and with constant demonstrations of their own strength. Conversely, what they fear and hate the most is their own weakness and submission to limitations.

For that reason, the weaker and more besieged the administration feels, the more compelled they will feel to make a showing of their power. Lashing out in response to feelings of weakness is a temptation most human beings have, but it is more than a mere temptation for George Bush. It is one of the predominant dynamics that drives his behavior.” This is what wrought the likes of Gitmo and Abu Gharib.

Certainly there is good reason to compare the Anglo/American axis to Rome, however the Romans were not even aware of the existence of the Chinese. This is where our situation is different. Undeniably the Anglo/American Axis has exposed itself to unprecedented risk through it’s energy dependence and unsustainable borrowing from the rest of the world to prop up unsustainable consumption at home.

114 years of American regime change started on Jan. 17, 1893, when Hawaii’s monarchy was overthrown as a group of businessmen and sugar planters forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate. The British attempted to occupy Iraq in 1929 in order to control the oil resources, the occupation failed, and it crushed the pound as the world's reserve currency. One wonders if 77 years later American regime change will meet it's Waterloo in the sands of Iran.

The New Dark Ages will be dominated by competition for scarce resources, oil, water, uranium and food. This competition will certainly feature the baser aspects of human nature in a higher concentrations that we are currently displaying. Our challenge remains is how we are to work things out together in the face of Peak Oil, Peak Food, and Peak Humanity.

I don’t suspect that the transition from the unsustainable to the sustainable will be pretty, but I am fairly sure that it is unavoidable and will be the defining issue of our time. As the world’s largest consumers we can have the greatest impact by changing our own behavior, without which there will be no future for peace, justice or civilization. It is time to re-teach ourselves how to live, who should lead us on.