Will Obama Exploit the Unemployed as Recruits for a Ramped Up War in Afghanistan?

By Paul Craig Roberts, CounterPunch. Posted February 11, 2009.

The U.S. will not be able to pay for its imports, a serious problem for a country dependent on imports for its energy, manufactured goods and advanced-technology products.

Obama's Keynesian advisors have learned with a vengeance Milton Friedman's lesson that the Great Depression resulted from the Federal Reserve permitting a contraction of the supply of money and credit.

In the Great Depression, good debts were destroyed by monetary contraction. Today, bad debts are being preserved by the expansion of money and credit, and the U.S. Treasury is jeopardizing its credit standing and the dollar's reserve-currency status with enormous quarterly bond auctions as far as the eye can see.

Meanwhile, the Russians, overflowing with energy and mineral resources, and not in debt, have learned that the U.S. government is not to be trusted. Russia has watched Reagan's successors attempt to turn former constituent parts of the Soviet Union into U.S. puppet states with U.S. military bases. The U.S. is trying to ring Russia with missiles that neutralize Russia's strategic deterrent.

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has caught on to "comrade wolf." He has succeeded in having the president of Kyrgyzstan, a former part of the Soviet Union, evict the U.S. from its military base. This base is essential to America's ability to supply its troops in Afghanistan.

To stop America's meddling in its sphere of influence, the Russian government has created a collective security treaty organization comprising Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan is a partial participant.

In other words, Russia has organized Central Asia against U.S. penetration.

To whose agenda is President Obama being hitched? Writing in the English-language version of the Swiss newspaper, Zeit-Fragen, Stephen J. Sniegoski reports that leading figures of the neocon conspiracy -- Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Brooks and Mona Charen -- are ecstatic over Obama's appointments. They don't see any difference between Obama and Bush/Cheney.

Not only are Obama's appointments moving him into an expanded war in Afghanistan, but the powerful Israel lobby is pushing Obama toward a war with Iran.

The unreality in which he U.S. government operates is beyond belief. A financially bankrupt government that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the U.S. taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!

Obama's war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

When asked about the mission, a military official told NBC News, "Frankly, we don't have one." NBC reports: "They're working on it."

Speaking to House Democrats on Feb. 5, Obama admitted that the government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid "mission creep without clear parameters," the U.S. needs a clear mission.

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander in chief who sent you to kill or be killed?  How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending service members on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?

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Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com.

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