Gene Lyons

[U.S. marines fire during a Taliban ambush as they carry out an operation to clear an area in Helmand province, October 9, 2009. (Reuters/Asmaa Waguih)]

One of the enduring oddities of the American foreign policy debate is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?

Certainly not in any military sense. The impoverished, largely illiterate Afghans have no army apart from the one U.S. and NATO forces, with very limited success, are trying to train. No air force, no navy, no offensive military capacity whatsoever.

From the U.S. perspective, Afghanistan is the absolute end of the earth. Indeed, it's not a nation at all. The idea that well-intentioned Westerners can create an efficient central government on, say, the Swiss model, where none has ever existed, much less one acceptable to Afghanistan's many warring tribes, sects and ethnic factions, is almost certainly a delusion.

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by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

T. Boone Pickens

Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens typifies what is dead wrong about America and what passes for 'foreign policy'. Pickens claims the US is 'entitled' to Iraqi oil. How convenient for the oil barons who conspired with Dick Cheney to carve up the oil fields of Iraq before 911 would give Bush the pretext he would need to attack and invade Iraq, a nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with 911.

Nevertheless, it would be claimed that Iraq was --somehow --a part of the 'war on terror'. Is there no end to the lies? Might I remind that on 911, it was a gang of Israelis, perhaps criminals from Mossad, who were seen dancing and celebrating! It was NOT Iraqis who celebrated the deaths of innocent Americans! Clearly --Bush waged war on everyone but the 'real terrorists'.

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