"It's ours, it's all ours, all of Backwardistan!"

Losing the Great Game in Afghanistan

by Devika Patel
September 16, 2011

Ten years ago, I watched the Twin Towers fall. A San Francisco Examiner headline the next day summed up my feelings fairly well: “Bastards!” Of course we had to fight back. I thought there’d be a bit of a scuffle, much like the first Gulf War, and we’d be done with the whole affair in a few weeks.

A decade later, do I ever feel silly. My eureka moment came around 2004, when I stumbled across a piece that had appeared in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur sometime in 1998, featuring former United States National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In Cheshire Cat fashion, Brzezinski explained that offering CIA aid to the mujahideen drew “the Russians into the Afghan trap,” where we armed the Taliban’s predecessors to the gills after Russia’s invasion. The unrepentant Brzezinski was delighted by his maneuver that gave Russia its own Vietnam War, bankrupting them and ending the Cold War.

But Brzezinski’s “agitated Muslims,” who flew planes into our towers, eventually proved far more troublesome than the Soviets who had been declining economically each day with or without their own Vietnam.

Drain52's reply, which I used for the subject stated things best.

A tangent here: have you ever wondered at how damn stupid empires can be? Why in God's name would anyone want to possess Afghanistan, or India, or any of the forsaken countries in central Asia? The British fought and died in order to get exactly what--Indian cotton, or Afghan opium? These things could have been purchased outright for much less than invading vast countries and maintaining armies.

I'm trying to grok the vision of some idiot Brit or Russky standing on a hillock in a wasteland who's yelling "It's ours, it's all ours, all of Backwardistan!"

And now we have moron Americans doing the same. Santayana (Ed. Note: spelling- which he corrected with an immediate follow-up) wasn't right enough: he who doesn't learn from history will it have it crammed down his throat.

The LOVE of MONEY and CONTROL. It is this simple and why Smedley Butler so rightly stated in his book, War is a Racket.


(A thank you to Brock Townsend for his link in the comments.)

If anyone doubts that these are the words of Major General Smedley Butler then see his book here.

Understand, this is also a huge part of what has bankrupted the Republic, but you know this too- or should.

"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing." William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694, then a privately owned bank

"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and money system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company.

"When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes… Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain." – Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, 1815

It is not as if the banksters have screwed the World, is it?

"Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws." Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild.

WP