paving the road to wwiii

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Stand up.

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love, 99
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fuck you, mcraven

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There aren't enough sheep on earth to make up for replacing plain slaughter with glib apologies.
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Hook us with the outrageous and then pile on the propaganda....

"DEBATE"? They're "debating" the legality? Jesus fuck.

Contractor "Road Warriors" abounding....

Not popping his cork hard enough for me....

How about curing warmongers instead?

No, that would be propaganda yer talkin', Stephen....

But, yes, you should watch it. Bite down on a rag or something. Do it.

CIVILIZED PEOPLE !!!

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again, iranian authorities appear to be telling the truth

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Ahmad Reza Radan, Iran's deputy police chief, acknowledged that "several people" had been killed, but denied that police had used guns to contain the protests.

Referring to four of the deaths, Radan said: "One fell off a bridge, two died in car accidents and one was killed by a bullet."

"As the police [force] was not using firearms this [death] is suspicious and it is being investigated," he said.

I have been looking at what images I can find of the current rioting in Iran and I can't find any police with guns, but plenty with truncheons and tear gas canisters... which would be the way I'd be playing it if I were in the position of the Iranian government, having to keep the streets safe from rioting and looting... and the protesters are even more violent this time than last. Plus, the video of Mousavi's nephew being killed is eerily like the Neda video.... They're working their hearts out to become card-carrying members of "The West" and don't seem to mind the danger of this turning into WWIII as they do it. Their government seems to mind. I mind.
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dogs of war

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Ooops. Has this been a decent enough interval before collapse? Or do we have to move back in to stabilize things again? With what? With whom? How?

Never fear, we can hire contractors enough to rule the world.*

What? You ask how we can afford this? Don't be silly. This is all we've been affording since we were born.
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Scott Horton interviews Tom Engelhardt about Obama's NINE surges in Afghanistan:


[37 minutes]
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*... so corporations can rule the world. No. Really. Don't be silly.
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another indecent interval

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These guys make short work of Obama's blather about more troops to Afghanistan. On the one hand, it's all readily apparent to any of us who lived through the Vietnam debacle, anybody who pays attention to this stuff, so why bring it up? But on the other, it's just still not apparent to too many, so it needs to be said. I don't exactly get the math where they say this is Obama's cold choice to get a second term... but... well... I'm strange... I'd think that this would prevent a second term... unless the owners will only make him win in 2012 if he does this... but, well, then, how stupid is that to think he will be able to push through his "progressive agenda" even then. Give me a break.
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i guess i am comforted

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... that so many have ceased trying to defend this egregious performance....

That's something like progress, innit?

peter b and reese erlich and robert parry on president mouth

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the consensus

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... for all the good it does us....

Glenn Greenwald

and

Michael Moore:

War President

Obama: 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan

Obama: "We Did Not Ask for This Fight"
Bush: "We Did Not Seek This Conflict"
Obama: "New Attacks are Being Plotted as I Speak"
Bush: "At This Moment ... Terrorists are Planning New Attacks"
Obama: "Our Cause is Just, Our Resolve Unwavering"

Bush: "Our Cause is Just, Our Coalition [is] Determined"
Obama: "This Is No Idle Danger, No Hypothetical Threat"

Bush: "The Enemies of Freedom Are Not Idle"
Obama: "We Have No Interest in Occupying Your Country"
Bush: "I Wouldn't Be Happy if I Were Occupied Either"

DO SOMETHING:
CodePink | SDS | United for Peace & Justice | World Can't Wait

And I'm sure there will be staggeringly many more to add. I even snatched something out of the side of my eye from the MSM saying "Bush Lite".

who wants to live forever?

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White House Eyes Afghan Exit by 2017
War Not Going to Last Forever, Spokesman Assures
by Jason Ditz, November 25, 2009

In an effort to reassure Americans ahead of next week’s speech in which President Obama will announce the escalation of the Afghan War, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs wants Americans to rest safe in the knowledge that the war is not going to last forever.

“We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan,” Gibbs noted, “we are not going to be there another eight or nine years.” This would mean that the administration is at least hoping at this point to be out of Afghanistan by 2017.

Recent polls have shown Americans increasingly opposed to not only the Afghan War, but to President Obama’s handling of it. In spite of this President Obama is expected to commit another 34,000 troops to the conflict in next week’s speech.

When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the military presence was comparatively limited, and even in summer of 2008 only about 28,000 American soldiers were on the ground. When the latest escalation is approved the US will have over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan.

A complete abdication runs our country.

more right under our noses from behind the curtain

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Or listen to him talk about it if you can't bear to do all that reading....

HINT: THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT.

Writing in The Nation Magazine, journalist Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent has revealed Blackwater is secretly operating in Pakistan under a covert program that includes planning the assassination and kidnapping of Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects. Blackwater is also said to be involved in a previously undisclosed U.S. military drone campaign that has killed scores of people inside Pakistan. Blackwater operatives have been working under a covert program run by the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s top covert operations force. The previously undisclosed JSOC operations would mark the first known confirmation of U.S. military activity inside Pakistan.

A military intelligence source said Blackwater o[perative]s are effectively running the drone bombings for both JSOC and the CIA. The CIA drone program is already public knowledge. But the military source says some of the deadliest drone attacks [] attributed to the CIA were actually carried out by JSOC. The article also reveals Blackwater operatives have taken part in ground operations with Pakistani forces under a subcontract with a local security firm. The operations have included house raids and border interdictions in northwest Pakistan and other areas.

Blackwater has also been given responsibility for planning JSOC operations in Uzbekistan. The Nation reports the program has become so secretive th[at] top Obama administration and military officials have likely been unaware of its existence.

[DN! transcripts are notoriously full of typos... so just listen to the report or trust me here.]

No. Really. It's important.

And I'm wondering if Sy Hersh might not have given Scahill one of his sources....

struggling for radical analysis to overtake liberal complaint

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Peter B interviews a sedated Tom Hayden and a still agonized Don Siegelman.

11 MONTHS IN, WE STILL HAVE ROVE'S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT.

pitchforks and torches would probably work better

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And some notes on our Nobel Laureate's drone action....

invade, devastate, pay not to lose

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The 1% sucks the life out of everyone, everywhere, equally....

lying sack of spin

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the spree

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Another War in the Works
by Paul Craig Roberts, September 29, 2009

Does anyone remember all the lies that they were told by then-president Bush and the "mainstream media" about the grave threat to America from weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? These lies were repeated endlessly in the print and TV media despite the reports from the weapons inspectors, who had been sent to Iraq, that no such weapons existed.

The weapons inspectors did an honest job in Iraq and told the truth, but the mainstream media did not emphasize their findings. Instead, the media served as a Ministry of Propaganda, beating the war drums for the U.S. government.

Now the whole process is repeating itself. This time the target is Iran.

As there is no real case against Iran, Obama took a script from Bush’s playbook and fabricated one.

First the facts: As a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran’s nuclear facilities are open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which carefully monitors Iran’s nuclear energy program to make certain that no material is diverted to nuclear weapons.

The IAEA has monitored Iran’s nuclear energy program and has announced repeatedly that it has found no diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program. All 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have affirmed and reaffirmed that Iran abandoned interest in nuclear weapons years ago.

In keeping with the safeguards agreement that the IAEA be informed before an enrichment facility comes online, Iran informed the IAEA on Sept. 21 that it had a new nuclear facility under construction. By informing the IAEA, Iran fulfilled its obligations under the safeguards agreement. The IAEA will inspect the facility and monitor the nuclear material produced to make sure it is not diverted to a weapons program.

Despite these unequivocal facts, Obama announced on Sept. 25 that Iran has been caught with a "secret nuclear facility" with which to produce a bomb that would threaten the world.

The Obama regime’s claim that Iran is not in compliance with the safeguards agreement is disinformation. Between the end of 2004 and early 2007, Iran voluntarily complied with an additional protocol (Code 3.1) that was never ratified and never became a legal part of the safeguards agreement. The additional protocol would have required Iran to notify the IAEA prior to beginning construction of a new facility, whereas the safeguards agreement in force requires notification prior to completion of a new facility. Iran ceased its voluntary compliance with the unratified additional protocol in March 2007, most likely because of the American and Israeli misrepresentations of Iran’s existing facilities and military threats against them.

By accusing Iran of having a secret "nuclear weapons program" and demanding that Iran "come clean" about the nonexistent program, adding that he does not rule out a military attack on Iran, Obama mimics the discredited Bush regime’s use of nonexistent Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" to set up Iraq for invasion.

The U.S. media, even the "liberal" National Public Radio, quickly fell in with the Obama lie machine. Steven Thomma of the McClatchy Newspapers declared the non-operational facility under construction, which Iran reported to the IAEA, to be "a secret nuclear facility."

Thomma, reported incorrectly that the world didn’t learn of Iran’s "secret" facility, the one that Iran reported to the IAEA the previous Monday, until Obama announced it in a joint appearance in Pittsburgh the following Friday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Obviously, Thomma has no command over the facts, a routine inadequacy of "mainstream media" reporters. The new facility was revealed when Iran voluntarily reported the facility to the IAEA on Sept. 21.

Ali Akbar Dareini, an Associated Press writer, reported, incorrectly, over AP: "The presence of a second uranium-enrichment site that could potentially produce material for a nuclear weapon has provided one of the strongest indications yet that Iran has something to hide."

Dareini went on to write that "the existence of the secret site was first revealed by Western intelligence officials and diplomats on Friday." Dareini is mistaken. We learned of the facility when the IAEA announced that Iran had reported the facility the previous Monday in keeping with the safeguards agreement.

Dareini’s untruthful report of "a secret underground uranium enrichment facility whose existence has been hidden from international inspectors for years" helped to heighten the orchestrated alarm.

There you have it. The president of the United States and his European puppets are doing what they do best – lying through their teeth. The U.S. "mainstream media" repeats the lies as if they were facts. The U.S. "media" is again making itself an accomplice to wars based on fabrications. Apparently, the media’s main interest is to please the U.S. government and hopefully obtain a taxpayer bailout of its failing print operations.

Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a rare man of principle who has not sold his integrity to the U.S. and Israeli governments, refuted in his report (Sept. 7, 2009) the baseless "accusations that information has been withheld from the Board of Governors about Iran’s nuclear program. I am dismayed by the allegations of some Member states, which have been fed to the media, that information has been withheld from the Board. These allegations are politically motivated and totally baseless. Such attempts to influence the work of the Secretariat and undermine its independence and objectivity are in violation of Article VII.F. of the IAEA Statute and should cease forthwith."

As there is no legal basis for action against Iran, the Obama regime is creating another hoax, like the nonexistent "Iraqi weapons of mass destruction." The hoax is that a facility, reported to the IAEA by Iran, is a secret facility for making nuclear weapons.

Just as the factual reports from the weapons inspectors in Iraq were ignored by the Bush regime, the factual reports from the IAEA are ignored by the Obama regime. Like the Bush regime, the Middle East policy of the Obama regime is based in lies and deception.

Who is the worse enemy of the American people, Iran or the government in Washington and the media whores who serve it?

oh, fer crapsakes, enough already!

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Even my seventy-nine-year-old-mother thinks Bin Laden is dead! And she's right! Why do they keep up with this shit? I wonder anymore if there's even anyone in the administration who is sponsoring this unmitigated bullcrap being put out every so often to try to bolster the popular will for murderating revenge. Maybe it's just some "defense" contractor who owns the AP....

Bin Laden prods US to end 'hopeless' Afghan war
By PAUL SCHEMM, Associated Press Writer – 4 mins ago

CAIRO – Osama bin Laden said in a new audiotape that President Barack Obama's strategy in Afghanistan is "hopeless" and called on Americans to resolve the conflict with al-Qaida by ending the war there and breaking the U.S. alliance with Israel.

In the message marking the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the al-Qaida leader avoided his usual rhetoric of jihad and instead took a more analytical tone, claiming its differences with the U.S. stemmed from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But analysts said Monday that the message's tone and its unusually short length — only 11 minutes, far shorter than others released by al-Qaida to mark the anniversary — was an indication that al-Qaida was struggling to maintain interest eight years after its most shattering terror attacks.

"You might interpret this as a sign of weakness, the suggestion being that they don't really want to fight the U.S.," Jeremy Binnie, an analyst with Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center, said of bin Laden's tone.

Arabs and Muslims' more positive feelings toward the new U.S. president are believed to have helped deflate al-Qaida's anti-American rhetoric, which found a receptive audience during the administration of former President George W. Bush, who was widely resented in the region. Also, the Iraq war — once a main front for al-Qaida's militants — has become less prominent as violence eased over the past two years and the presence of U.S. troops was reduced.

The main front now is Afghanistan, where the Obama administration is contemplating sending more troops to battle al-Qaida's ally, the Taliban. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces said Friday he sees no signs of a major al-Qaida presence in the country.

In the audiotape, posted late Thursday on Islamic militant Web sites, bin Laden sought to depict Obama as merely continuing the policies of Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

"If you end the (Afghan) war, so be it, but otherwise we will continue the war of attrition against you," he said, addressing the American people. "You are waging a hopeless and losing war, a war in which the end is not visible on the horizon."

But bin Laden used most of the message to detail the reason for al-Qaida's campaign against the United States.

"The cause of our disagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine," he said, adding that this support "pushed us to undertake "the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

He argued that Washington — even under Obama — was under the thrall of "neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby." He said Obama and White House officials "act like Cheney and Bush and promote the previous policies of fear to market the interests of big companies" and pull Americans into wars that he said have bankrupted the United States.

If America reconsiders its alliance with Israel, he said, al-Qaida will respond on "sound and just bases."

The Saudi construction magnate's son-turned "holy warrior" has frequently sought to wrap al-Qaida in the Palestinian cause, seeking to draw support in the Arab world, where the issue is one of the public's top concerns.

However the Palestinians themselves — even the militant Hamas organization — have distanced themselves from al-Qaida and cracked down on those espousing a similar extremist ideology inside the Gaza Strip.

The short message was in sharp contrast to others issued around the Sept. 11 anniversary. In 2007, al-Qaida marked the anniversary with multiple videos by several of its leaders, including bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahri. Just last year, it issued a massive 90-minute opus summing up seven years of struggle around the world.

Evan Kohlman, a terrorism expert at globalterroralert.com, said al-Qaida appears to have been unable to come up with a way to confront the popularity of the new U.S. president. Obama has pursued a policy of seeking better ties with Arabs and Muslims, giving a landmark speech in Cairo in June, moving to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and taking a somewhat harder stance on Israel in the peace process.

"I would have thought for Sept. 11 he could have said something more ground breaking and significant," said Kohlman.

Whatever. It's just crap from start to finish, like the goddam color-coded terror alerts they tried for so long. Can't we find whoever it is who's doing this and clap him or her or them behind bars? WTF stands in the way of fixing this stuff?

obummerz abounding on iran

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And, I guess, while I'm about linking Arnold, I should throw this one in, too, because it just about perfectly reflects my feelings on the Rafsanjani, Mousavi, Khatami thing... only nicer....

whoa, how'd i miss this?

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It's really hard, blogging without my bookmarks!

12:40 August 13th, 2009
Who is funding the Afghan Taliban? You don’t want to know
REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

The article by Jean MacKenzie originally appeared in GlobalPost. This is part of a special series by GlobalPost called Life, Death and The Taliban.

KABUL — It is the open secret no one wants to talk about, the unwelcome truth that most prefer to hide. In Afghanistan, one of the richest sources of Taliban funding is the foreign assistance coming into the country.

Virtually every major project includes a healthy cut for the insurgents. Call it protection money, call it extortion, or, as the Taliban themselves prefer to term it, “spoils of war,” the fact remains that international donors, primarily the United States, are to a large extent financing their own enemy.

“Everyone knows this is going on,” said one U.S. Embassy official, speaking privately.

It is almost impossible to determine how much the insurgents are spending, making it difficult to pinpoint the sources of the funds.

Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, former Taliban minister to Pakistan, was perhaps more than a bit disingenuous when he told GlobalPost that the militants were operating mostly on air.

“The Taliban does not have many expenses,” he said, smiling slightly. “They are barefoot and hungry, with no roof over their heads and a stone for their pillow.” As for weapons, he just shrugged. “Afghanistan is full of guns,” he said. “We have enough guns for years.”

The reality is quite different, of course. The militants recruit local fighters by paying for their services. They move about in their traditional 4×4s, they have to feed their troops, pay for transportation and medical treatment for the wounded, and, of course, they have to buy rockets, grenades and their beloved Kalashnikovs.

Up until quite recently, most experts thought that drug money accounted for the bulk of Taliban funding. But even here opinion was divided on actual amounts. Some reports gauged the total annual income at about $100 million, while others placed the figure as high as $300 million — still a small fraction of the $4 billion poppy industry.

Now administration officials have launched a search for Taliban sponsors. Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told a press conference in Islamabad last month that drugs accounted for less of a share of Taliban coffers than was previously thought.

“In the past there was a kind of feeling that the money all came from drugs in Afghanistan,” said Holbrooke, according to media reports. “That is simply not true.”

The new feeling is that less than half of the Taliban’s war chest comes from poppy, with a variety of sources, including private contributions from Persian Gulf states, accounting for much of the rest. Holbrooke told reporters that he would add a member of the Treasury Department to his staff to pursue the question of Taliban funding.

But perhaps U.S. officials need look no further than their own backyard.

Anecdotal evidence is mounting that the Taliban are taking a hefty portion of assistance money coming into Afghanistan from the outside.

This goes beyond mere protection money or extortion of “taxes” at the local level — very high-level negotiations take place between the Taliban and major contractors, according to sources close to the process.

A shadowy office in Kabul houses the Taliban contracts officer, who examines proposals and negotiates with organizational hierarchies for a percentage. He will not speak to, or even meet with, a journalist, but sources who have spoken with him and who have seen documents say that the process is quite professional.

The manager of an Afghan firm with lucrative construction contracts with the U.S. government builds in a minimum of 20 percent for the Taliban in his cost estimates. The manager, who will not speak openly, has told friends privately that he makes in the neighborhood of $1 million per month. Out of this, $200,000 is siphoned off for the insurgents.

If negotiations fall through, the project will come to harm — road workers may be attacked or killed, bridges may be blown up, engineers may be assassinated.

The degree of cooperation and coordination between the Taliban and aid workers is surprising, and would most likely make funders extremely uncomfortable.

One Afghan contractor, speaking privately, told friends of one project he was overseeing in the volatile south. The province cannot be mentioned, nor the particular project.

“I was building a bridge,” he said, one evening over drinks. “The local Taliban commander called and said ‘don’t build a bridge there, we’ll have to blow it up.’ I asked him to let me finish the bridge, collect the money — then they could blow it up whenever they wanted. We agreed, and I completed my project.”

In the south, no contract can be implemented without the Taliban taking a cut, sometimes at various steps along the way.

One contractor in the southern province of Helmand was negotiating with a local supplier for a large shipment of pipes. The pipes had to be brought in from Pakistan, so the supplier tacked on about 30 percent extra for the Taliban, to ensure that the pipes reached Lashkar Gah safely.

Once the pipes were given over to the contractor, he had to negotiate with the Taliban again to get the pipes out to the project site. This was added to the transportation costs.

“We assume that our people are paying off the Taliban,” said the foreign contractor in charge of the project.

In Farah province, local officials report that the Taliban are taking up to 40 percent of the money coming in for the National Solidarity Program, one of the country’s most successful community reconstruction projects, which has dispensed hundreds of millions of dollars throughout the country over the past six years.

Many Afghans see little wrong in the militants getting their fair share of foreign assistance.

“This is international money,” said one young Kabul resident. “They are not taking it from the people, they are taking it from their enemy.”

But in areas under Taliban control, the insurgents are extorting funds from the people as well.

In war-ravaged Helmand, where much of the province has been under Taliban control for the past two years, residents grumble about the tariffs.

“It’s a disaster,” said a 50-year-old resident of Marja district. “We have to give them two kilos of poppy paste per jerib during the harvest; then we have to give them ushr (an Islamic tax, amounting to one-tenth of the harvest) from our wheat. Then they insisted on zakat (an Islamic tithe). Now they have come up with something else: 12,000 Pakistani rupee (approximately $150) per household. And they won’t take even one rupee less.”

It all adds up, of course. But all things are relative: if the Taliban are able to raise and spend say $1 billion per year — the outside limit of what anyone has been able to predict — that accounts for what the United States is now spending on 10 days of the war to defeat them.

figure it out

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Gates: 'A few years' of combat in Afghanistan
By LARA JAKES and ANNE GEARAN (AP)

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon presented a grim portrait of the Afghanistan war Thursday, offering no assurances about how long Americans will be fighting there or how many U.S. combat troops it will take to win.

Defeating the Taliban and al-Qaida will take "a few years," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, with success on a larger scale in the desperately poor country a much longer proposition. He acknowledged that the Taliban has a firm hold on parts of the country President Barack Obama has called vital to U.S. security.

Congress wants answers to what lawmakers described as basic questions to soothe a war-weary American public.

"In the intelligence business, we always used to categorize information in two ways, secrets and mysteries," Gates, a former CIA director, told a Pentagon news conference.

He added: "Mysteries were those where there were too many variables to predict. And I think that how long U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan is in that area."

With 62,000 U.S. troops already in the country, and another 6,000 headed there by the end of the year, Gates suggested there is little appetite in Washington to add many more.

He said his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is free to ask for whatever he needs, but Gates said when the general submits a revised war plan in the coming weeks it will not contain a request to expand the U.S. fighting force.

McChrystal is expected to identify shortfalls that could be filled by U.S. forces, but a formal request would come only later. The White House has made no secret of its skepticism about further troop additions in Afghanistan, and Gates said Thursday he still was worried that too many American forces could turn Afghans against those trying to help them.

Obama has made Afghanistan one of his top foreign policy priorities. But his administration is grappling with refocusing on Afghanistan, which the U.S. invaded in October 2001 to hunt for Osama bin Laden, while disentangling 130,000 American troops from Iraq.

In a report released earlier this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned the Obama administration that unanswered questions about lingering U.S. involvement in Afghanistan could frustrate the public.

"The administration has raised the stakes by transforming the Afghan war from a limited intervention into a more ambitious and potentially risky counterinsurgency," the Senate report concluded. "These core questions about commitment and sacrifice can be answered only through a rigorous and informed national debate."

Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., cited "risks and rewards associated with our increasing commitment to the war in Afghanistan."

As the fight moves toward its ninth year this fall, Gates said allied forces must show this year that they are turning the tide.

"It's just not possible to predict specific periods of time when you're in a conflict like this, where ... the enemy has a vote and where there are so many variables," Gates said.

Appearing alongside Gates, the nation's second-highest ranking military officer agreed there is no date certain for an exit.

Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Marine Gen. James Cartwright said he is looking for evidence of U.S. and NATO troops increasingly turning security missions over to Afghan forces as a sign of when Americans might ramp down their presence.

"When you start to see that attitude change, then you start to have a sense that things are going to move in a direction that would be towards the end of the violence side of this equation," Cartwright said.

The Senate report also noted the wide-ranging timeline for U.S. troops in the fight cited by unidentified military leaders, policy-makers and outside experts around Washington: anywhere from two years to over a decade.

"None of the civilian officials or military officers interviewed in Afghanistan and elsewhere expected substantial progress in the short term. They talked in terms of years two, five and 10," the report noted.

The varying timelines, in part, may reflect politics.

Capitol Hill has grown wary of approving annual war chests after years of ever-increasing costs for Iraq. Obama has asked Congress for $68 billion next year to fund defense spending in Afghanistan. The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, recently asked for another $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending, The Washington Post reported this week.

Military officials believe the Afghanistan mission can only succeed if troops are there far longer — anywhere from five years to 12 years.

Cartwright suggested that some changes will be needed "pretty soon."

"The IED fight is pretty lethal," Cartwright said, referring to improvised explosive devices left on roadsides which are now the cause of the majority of U.S. and NATO deaths.

Last month 49 coalition troops died in bomb attacks, a more than six-fold increase from the eight killed in roadside and suicide bomb attacks in July 2008, according to U.S. figures.

oh, no, wait! this is too wonderful

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Russia and Iran Join Hands
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

July 28, 2009 "Asia Times" -- The United States may think of Russia as a strategic partner when it comes to Iran. In reality, the geostrategic tensions between Washington and Moscow are still powerful enough to warrant a common approach by Russia and its eastern neighbor Iran with respect to a deterrent strategy towards the intrusive Western superpower.

This week, a small but significant clue is on full display with joint Russia-Iran military exercises in the Caspian Sea involving some 30 vessels. This is partially disguised by a benign environmental cause.

The maneuver, dubbed "Regional Collaboration for a Secure and Clean Caspian", combines security and maritime objectives in the Caspian Sea, the world's largest lake and also a main energy hub that is now the scene of competing alternatives for energy transfer. It signals a new trend in Iran-Russia military cooperation that will most likely increase in the near and intermediate future in light of Iran's observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The continuing standoff over Iran's nuclear program should affect this warming of relations.

Iran's willingness to join this exercise represents a complete about-face from seven years ago. In May 2002, Tehran reacted sharply to a Russian military exercise in the Caspian - held in the aftermath of a failed summit on the issue - by refusing to even send a military observer to the maneuver.

Despite all the ups and downs of Iran-Russia relations since then, the weight of geopolitical and geo-economic considerations on both countries has increasingly switched towards greater cooperation, much to the chagrin of Washington, which is keen on isolating "nuclearizing Iran".

At a time when Russia feels undermined by US-backed pipeline projects in the region, as well as dismayed by the absence of any compromise by the Barack Obama administration on its planned installation of an anti-missile shield in Eastern Europe, Moscow's intention to upgrade its military connections with Tehran is calculated. The signal to Washington is that Russia does not tolerate any direct or indirect "regime change" scenario with respect to Iran, a major pillar of anti-US sentiment in the region.

The two-day military exercises are being closely watched by the region's other littoral states - Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan - as well as neighboring states in the Caucasus and Central Asia, some of which are aligned with the West and are wary of a new level of Russia-Iran military ties.

Should Russia make good on its promise to put into operation the much-delayed Bushehr power plant that it is building in Iran, a good deal of present Iranian misgivings about Russia will disappear. After all, Russia is Iran's sole nuclear partner and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev openly rebuffed Obama's attempt, in his recent Moscow visit, to link a new arms limitation treaty with the issue of new sanctions on Iran.

Not surprisingly, on the eve of the Russia-Iran military exercise, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed the US's toughening approach toward Iran, by stating categorically that the US was opposed to Iran's possession of a "full enrichment" program, even though this is allowed under the articles of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory. Clinton's statement on Sunday is in sharp contrast with Obama's statement during his tour of Prague, when he hinted that the US was willing to accept Iran's enrichment program as long as it was fully monitored by the United Nations' atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A widening gap between Moscow and Washington over Iran is indisputable and will likely impact the Obama administration's plans for tough new sanctions later this year. Tehran has already been slapped with several rounds of UN sanctions, as well as those imposed unilaterally by the US over its nuclear program.

United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting Israel this week, told his hosts that he would remain "hopeful" about the administration's engagement with Iran for the next few months, hinting about an emerging deadline for the "engagement" that has unnerved Israel and some moderate Arab states as well.

Compared with the hypothetical US-Iran engagement, relations between Russia and Iran are progressing toward a honeymoon born of geostrategic considerations. The joint maneuver in the Caspian may prove a starting point for more comprehensive military collaboration between the Russian and Iranian navies, particularly if Moscow sets aside its previous refusal to allow new Iranian naval vessels to enter the Caspian through the Volga channel.

Russia's Caspian neighbors - above all Azerbaijan - may not like it, given the dispute between Tehran and Baku over a Caspian oil field. Still, the imperative of closer Russia-Iran cooperation to fend off Western influence dictates the need to beef up Iran's naval presence in the Caspian.

An important question deals with the possible ramifications of closer Russia-Iran military cooperation on the stalemate over the ownership of the Caspian Sea. Most of the Caspian is already portioned out by bilateral and trilateral agreements, involving Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Iran remains unhappy over Russia's lack of cooperation on this matter. This has been somewhat compensated by both countries agreeing on the common use of Caspian surface water, going back to the 1921 Iran-Russia friendship agreement. The earlier pact is the legal foundation for today's naval cooperation between the two countries.

Meanwhile, the predominant sentiment in Iran is that Moscow must make some concessions to Iran on the thorny issue of the Caspian's legal authority in order to gain Tehran's full confidence. Even Iranian officials in charge of Caspian affairs are unclear about what exactly Russia can do about a situation that is partially controlled by the other Caspian littoral states.

Blaming Russia for the stalemate over Caspian legal rights is a favorite pastime of some of Iran's reformists, who despise Moscow's early embrace of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad after the June 12 presidential elections. Such criticisms must be tempered by a cold calculation of Russia's limits of influence on the other Caspian states which have carved up the inland sea among themselves.

Another question raised by the maneuvers pertains to the Persian Gulf, considered a de facto "American lake", where France has entered the scene via a deal with the United Arab Emirates for a permanent military base. Iran's weak response to France's arrival, inexcusable by Iran's foreign policy standards, may be balanced by similar Iran-Russia military exercise in the Persian Gulf.

As such, the Caspian joint maneuver may well turn out to be the harbinger of a broader agenda that includes the concept of a gas cartel.

This so intensely ROCKS! It's going to make those murderating fucks, cruising for WWIII, think a little harder.