How can one respond to this article in 350 words? Firstly, we can accept up front that the UN has no bearing on world affairs in any way. If Israel and its puppet state US want a war as in the case of both Iraq and now Afghanistan it will happen. If we can accept that, we can move on.
Right at the moment, it is clear that these two military delinquents have their sights on Iran. The reasons (pure logic)..Iran has no bombs, has signed the NPT; Israel has 250 bombs, has not signed the NPT. Forget the US. It does what it is told by the Jewish lobby who just happen to cunningly control the media, particularly Murdoch.
But war. Let's have no uncertainty on this front. When Howard 'the man of steel' said we are with you, George, he didn't really give a damn about death, casualties, but was much more concerned in playing sycophant to the world's #1 military power. The fact that Iraq's oil is now in US hands, that there needs to be a pipeline across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India for future US supplies and now relating to today's insidious Jewish media campaign against Iran, please remember that it has the second largest oil reserves in the world.
What a coincidence that must seem to us all. Iraq's oil, Iran's oil and a pipeline from the Turkmenistan oilfields to India.
The pay-off...Afghanistan and its poppy fields, untouched. 90% of the world's heroin to promote an already dead Bin Laden and a decimated Taliban.
Something of a slight deviation at this point, is the importance of India and Pakistan. Why? They gave nuclear bombs and are totally unstable politically. Why then would one worry about Iran with no nuclear capability while we have India and Pakistan and of course, the evil Empire, Israel, armed to the teeth.
So wars have reasons and with the diminishing supplies of fossil fuels in the world, this is all long range planning, just to survive.
Australia is there for credibility only. A sad fact. (Out of space)

In essence the article said very little. It was a plea to think about the war without taking the debate any further. Kellie wants people to do her thinking for her.
There may have been a case for not going into Afhanistan in the first place but now we are there I would feel uncomfortable about simply upping and leaving the people to the mercy of the Taliban monsters. In fact, the one option that is ever likely to be acceptable in the short term is to some how stabilise the place and leave.
At the moment that is just not happening. The coalition needs to completely overhaul its tactics, and there are indications it has done so. That's a long story but Kellie would make a real contribution to shortening this war if she dropped these empty declations of peace, and started researching Guerrilla counter tactics. Perhaps start with David Kilcullen's the Accdiental Guerrilla.. an eye opener.

Sorry, Peter Hume. Didn't read you response before I sent mine in. Out of words anyway.

You are right on the Ron Paul matter. A gutsy Texan who deserves to be President of the US in that he has a mind, is being patriotic to the US instead of to Israel and at the risk of his seat in the next election is prepared to be honest in a Congress that is so corrupt and subservient to the Israeli lobby on foreign policy, that the US foundling fathers would turn in their graves.

The points you make are so right. We can influence nothing in an Afghanistan war but are needed there for US credibility. The more countries, the more credible they appear. They can by-pass the useless United Nations providing they can encourage others to provide a medical team, a school building program, and other miscellaneous functions. It sure looks like a world body that way.
As in my previous mail, I would gamble all my assets on the fact that Bin Laden has been dead for years. He was on dialysis 5 years ago but it suits the CIA to keep him as an ogre. Like the Taliban; how many are there? They are hardly any competition for the world's #1 military power with over 700 bases worldwide, if the US was at all serious, that is.
Doesn't pay one to look at these things too closely. That's why you need to own the media....which they do.

So this is the old style of warfare. That is, we engage with the enemy and if we harm or kill innocent civilians - then so be it. So this is the old style of warfare.

In the new style of warfare, The U.S. leads a coalition of nations. If there is a problem with a rogue nation, then The President and/or Secretary of State speak with the leadership of the rogue nation and put aside differences to work together as friends to solve the problem as a team. That is, as when we treat others as friends they often reciprocate.

But not everyone wants to be friends. So we bring the military to the negotiation table and remove them if need be. There is no need to wage war against their country - just remove them if need be and then replace them with a new leadership team which is democratically elected.

The future is all about developing long term friendships where we look after each other. If we have no enemies, then it is unlikely we will ever be attacked. So this has good national security benefits. It is best to give them the resources to solve their problems themselves, that is, because of cultural and other factors foreigners often don't belong there and, as such, we can't develop the rapport needed to create lasting change.

Follow the links to some of my related weblog posts,

http://johnanthonypattison.blogspot.com/2010/02/answer-to-iran.html

http://johnanthonypattison.blogspot.com/2010/02/some-further-comments-on-answer-to-iran.html

http://johnanthonypattison.blogspot.com/2010/02/future-directions-in-international.html

I develop simple answers, because simple things are easier to implement. It's all about focusing on the cause of the problem - which is the leadership - and not the average mums and dads or the military who may not even agree with their leaders on the matters of critical concern.

John



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The principle justification for this war, after eight years, remains the claim that a terrorist organisation known as al Qaeda used Afghanistan as a base in which to train terrorists and from which the terrorist atrocity of 9/11 was launched. Here's US President Obama restating that justification in Afghanistan recently:

"We can’t forget why we’re here. We did not choose this war. This was not an act of America wanting to expand its influence; of us wanting to meddle in somebody else’s business. We were attacked viciously on 9/11. Thousands of our fellow countrymen and women were killed. And this is the region where the perpetrators of that crime, al Qaeda, still base their leadership. Plots against our homeland, plots against our allies, plots against the Afghan and Pakistani people are taking place as we speak right here. And if this region slides backwards, if the Taliban retakes this country and al Qaeda can operate with impunity, then more American lives will be at stake. The Afghan people will lose their chance at progress and prosperity. And the world will be significantly less secure." (http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/3043)

Our own Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has repeated this justification on a number of occasions, including on (or, possibly, just before) 26 March 2009:

"When you think about Afghanistan, think about this. I cannot remove from my mind the image of the twin towers coming down. We are there because terrorists, operating out of the safe haven of Afghanistan, caused that to happen. They also, having been trained in Afghanistan, were responsible for murdering nearly a hundred Australians in Bali a year later.

"We have therefore a combined responsibility to do whatever we can to make sure Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for terrorism again. It's going to be tough, it's going to be hard, and it's going to be difficult and dangerous." (http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2526935.htm)

This, of course, restates what he said in that address of 15 October 2008 referred to by Kellie Tranter at http://www.pm.gov.au/node/5517

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In fact the evidence has never been produced, even though then US Secretary of State Colin Powell promised the UN evidence of the guilt of al Qaeda and of the Taliban regime's complicity when he obtained the UN's tentative support for the War on Terror.

Our own eyes tell us that the Twin Towers were blown apart with high explosives (http://ae911truth.org/images/stories/explo2.jpg http://ae911truth.org/) and that WTC 7 'collapsed' as a result of a classic controlled demolition ("WTC7 in Freefall" at http://911blogger.com/node/17685 http://911blogger.com/node/18771 http://911blogger.com/node/18951 http://911blogger.com/node/18969).

So, there is no possible way that a group operating out of caves in Afghanistan could have accomplished this and then covered up those facts in the subsequent 'inquiries'.

So, the core pretext for this war peddled by Obama, Rudd, Brown, Blair, Howard and Bush is a fraudulent lie.

For for further evidence which demolishes the official justification for the Afghan War, please refer to the discussion in the forum in response to Kellie Tranter's related article "Australia, Afghanistan and three unanswered questions" of 11 Feb 10 at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10034&page=39

(I apologise that this discussion has been considerably disrupted by people trying to prevent the truth from being understood, but that is beyond my control.)

Other discussions can be found at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3330&page=41 http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2166&page=83