War on terror forever

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/OA23Dj06.html



War on terror forever
By Pepe Escobar
Jan 23, 2013

And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to... The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of "Geronimo", aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.

It's now official - coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at the AFRICOM site, the Pentagon's weaponized African branch.

Exit "historical" al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey's words, AQIM "is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if... left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat."

With Mali now elevated to the status of a "threat" to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn't do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression "The Long War", they really meant it.



unhappycamper comment: For those of you not familiar with Vietnam, this is another do-over.

After WWII, the United States paid around 70% of France's cost to recolonize French Indochina. After the French got booted out of Vietnam in 1954, American advisors were on the ground to protect "American business interests". Or to protect us from communists; who knows?

How many simultaneous wars can we afford to have? How many of them can we put on the National credit card?

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt