Rebel News - Independent News and Analysis

We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years.  Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad.  And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded?  In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better.  In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.

"I feel sorry for Tiger Woods. Why are we talking about this when we're sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan?  You've got this history-changing event going on and we're talking about Tiger's private life and golf injuries.  He's being used as a diversion and it just drives me crazy." - Mel Gibson in the UK Daily Mail, 2010

A commentary by Anthony Lawson on Gordon Brown's statement to The Iraq Inquiry

With the first major phase of nato's offensive against the Taliban completed, the coalition forces are sharing high expectations they will break the militants' control in other areas, as well. But brigadier Amir Sultan Tarar, widely regarded as the 'Godfather of Taliban', told RT that NATO will never succeed in Afghanistan, and they should, instead, enter negotiations with insurgent leaders.

According to the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, a lot of money is leaving Afghanistan and it is confounding U.S. officials. “The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai,” reports the newspaper.

“The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, is trying to figure out whether some of the money comes from Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.”

Post-9/11, Dick Cheney warned of wars that won't end in our lifetime. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said America "is engaged in World War IV, and it could continue for years....This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us." GHW Bush called it a "New World Order" in his September 11, 1990 address to a joint session of Congress as he prepared the public for Operation Desert Storm.

The Pentagon called it the "long war" in its 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), what past administrations waged every year without exception since the republic's birth, at home and abroad. Obama is just the latest of America's warrior presidents that included Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush preceding him.

Let us consider a puzzle about the Afghanistan war. Recently, Lieutenant-General Hamid Gul, formerly of the Pakistani army and head of the country’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency (1987-89), remarked: “In this situation, what are the Americans trying to achieve – I don't know. There is much ambiguity about their political objectives. Every military conflict must have a political purpose. I cannot discern that there is any political purpose.”

The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper's website for the past three days was the "Inside the Beltway" report, "Explosive News," [By Jennifer Harper, February 22, 2010]about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.

Considered the largest and most powerful private military group in the world, Blackwater has gotten itself into deep legal troubles all over the world. RT Correspondent Lauren Lyster joins Alyona live in studio, after returning from the Senate hearings into the Blackwater company, as they face fierce opposition from American lawmakers