Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

A nation of doubters, of cynics, of conspiracies; it doesn’t matter whether we are in Los Angeles or Cleveland, or Halifax, or Toronto; it is now always the same. According to a large number of people, and people who call in, we are in Afghanistan because of undeclared intentions: oil and oil politics; pipelines to the Caspian Sea — never mind al-Qaeda, Osama, 9/11 or the Taliban.

In Fahrenheit 911 a few years ago, filmmaker Michael Moore showed the Bush Whitehouse links to the House of Saud, The Taliban and anyone who might assist oil development, no matter how unsavory. The polemical documentary thankfully stopped short of blaming Bush for 9/11, instead it showed him to be stupid and slow and an administration that was anxious to ratchet up the fear factor in order to mobilize the state in support of the American invasion of Iraq. Indeed, the U.S. government couldn’t wait to get out of Afghanistan and leave a token force there so they could focus on Iraq for no good reason (other than oil). There is no oil in Afghanistan.

The shadow cast by the invasion of Iraq upon a false predicate (weapons of mass destruction) now falls upon every single event in international relations. No one now believes a thing the authorities say — be they American, British or Canadian.

For many, there is always a hidden agenda, an oil interest, a government-coddled corporation like Halliburton that is ready to profit. People now conflate Afghanistan and Iraq into one and the same where we Canadians have Afghanistan, and America has Iraq (with Afghanistan as a side-show).

Today we learned that while America has the private security firm Blackwater, a firm severely profiting from the Iraq war, and whose owner is a friend of Bush’s and whose company, according to the Iraqi puppet government, is responsible for outrageous behaviour involving innocent civilian deaths, we in Canada have Saladin – a British firm the Canadian government has secretly hired to defend diplomats. Why are private security firms there in the first place to defend government property and interests?

Clearly, both the evolution of private security firms such as Blackwater and Saladin are symptomatic examples of the merging of Big Business and Big government along defense department lines — growing outward from big defense contractors like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, GE, and Northrop to now include big oil developers (Halliburton) and others in the high tech and security and financial fields.

When the “big lie” about Iraq was as big as it was, and the whole of the American media was high-jacked into cowed compliance, and where not a dissenting voice was heard, it seems logical now that the public is just plain disbelieving about everything.

Last week we were told about a poll in Afghanistan that showed how much the Canadian forces are welcomed there, and what a good job we are doing. Unfortunately, about 70 per cent of them had no idea that Canadians were actually fighting the Taliban. Moreover, the countryside was not polled; these were folks in our areas of control, dependent upon us too. People tend to say nice things about you when they need you and you have guns and they don’t.

In Vietnam, in the early seventies, you could have asked anyone in Saigon about how much love there was for the U.S. and they would have nodded — the countryside, however, and the north, had a different idea.

Vietnam and Afghanistan: winning hearts and minds in the countryside. One has rice paddies and the other has poppy fields. And with Pakistan (the Taliban’s benefactor) on the verge of a civil war and in even less control of the tribal regions now than ever, the chances of NATO cutting off supply lines to the Taliban and Pashtun tribesman is ever more remote.

So, now, no one believes the state when it talks about “success” in Afghanistan anymore than people in America bought that the Vietnam War was being won after North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet offensive; like Vietnam, and like Iraq, the rest of it was the slow roll of inevitability.

Afghanistan is no different. History is a good teacher.

The sad part is that Canadians stumbled into the Afghan war, according to international relations Professor Janice Gross Stein, at the opportunistic urging of defense Chief Rick Hillier as outlined in her new book with Eugene Lang The Unexpected War. The sadder part is Canadians are really dying this time. The saddest part is many of us don’t believe why.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 6:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.