Originally published at http://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/04/19/we-could-have-greened-half-us-electrical-grid-226-wasted-afghan-war
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Afghanistan has no oil but could be used by pipelines to ship oil from former Soviet Republics. I read they are rich in certain rare earth minerals. Follow the money. Besides war itself is big business in and of itself.
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Heck, almost any other use of that $2.26 trillion would have been a far better investment than the 20-year wargasmic clusterfuck known as the Afghan War. War is the worst policy alternative. Literally anything… would be better than war. Why do so-called leaders cook up these military adventures and throw all that taxpayer money into pointless conflagrations? Oh, never mind. We all know why. And the reasons are so crass and shameful, sprung from tortured, self-absorbed half-wits. It might not be possible to imagine a more pathetic fate for such a beautiful animal, the human… led so far astray by fear and the machinations of cruel hucksters.
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We could have paid for the entire renewable grid with the savings added from not using…
Then alter the food production
education
transportation
healthcare
of course that is one of the reasons that we do not.
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Yes, we could have done that, but it’s not as sexy as keeping the money in the hands of the obscenely wealthy military-industrial complex.
“It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.”
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Before he was elected POTUS, Dubya had the Taliban, still in power in Afghanistan, to his ranch in Texas. Dubya’s people wanted the Taliban to let them build a pipeline from the former USSR countries, where US oil bigs were drilling, to the Indian Ocean across their country. The Taliban told them what they could stick where. They told the Taliban that fire and thunder would rain down on their country. Cool, the Taliban said, and went home.
After 9/11, there was no reason to attack Afghanistan. American intelligence knew that Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan, where he was when Obama took him out, where he had been all the time in between. The obscured reason was to get that pipeline. They still don’t have it.
In all of human history, no one has invaded Afghanistan and beaten it. Afghanis are the best guerrilla fighters ever. Alexander the Great died there. Even the Russians got out while they could. But the US? Duh.
The US only fights wars for money. Everywhere we have troops today is for money and medals.
The war I was in, Vietnam, was for oil, tin, and rubber. Vietnam threw the US out, but it couldn’t beat an economic embargo that seized a once wealthy rice producer and made it the poorest country on the planet (what the US is doing to Venezuela now, before the guerrilla war the Pentagon finally knows it couldn’t win - no invader wins a guerrilla war, but it can wreck an economy) before the Vietnamese knuckled under and signed papers giving those resources to the US corporations who wanted them.
There is no glory in fighting for this country’s ruling elite. All the honor in US wars is in trying to keep fighters you love from dying for money they will never see.
The ruling elite came in morally bankrupt from British Empire, believing slavery was an okay way to make money, and they went rapidly down the toilet from there. It’s not morally healthy to attempt emulating Rome.
We’re 30 ppm from 450 ppm of carbon pollution in the atmosphere. Runaway climate change, with no options left for humans (or anyone else), occurs at 450 ppm. The ruling elite wants the last drop of capital growth it can wring out of Gaia. Sociopaths?
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Could’ve had enough but had to have it all. If only we weren’t a failed species.
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