U.S. independence suffers massive blow ~ By Roger Hedgecock

By Roger Hedgecock © 2009 While the world and the American mainstream media were swooning over the Obamas in Europe, the independence and sovereignty of the U.S. suffered. The media's flattering pictures and fulsome words of Obama praise could not mask the price Obama paid for the harmony portrayed ("my new comrade" enthused Russian "President" Medvedev) and the "successes" counted. First, there's the war without end going into its eighth year in Afghanistan. At the NATO meeting, Obama failed to get European troop commitments. He desperately sought to deflect criticism that the U.S. was going it alone in escalating that war. While there are 32,000 European troops in Afghanistan already, too many are positioned far from the fighting. American troops will increase from 38,000 to 59,000 on Obama's orders – and will be used to intensify the war in the area of eastern Afghanistan/western Pakistan. Maj. Gen. John Campbell, the Army's deputy director of regional operations says the war will be "a long struggle." So far, 673 Americans have died in this war. Casualties in the first quarter of this year are twice as high as last year's first quarter. Experts believe it could take 50 years to "stabilize" Afghanistan. Sixty percent of the people there are illiterate; most people don't have a radio, TV or telephone. Only 12 percent of the land is arable – and the biggest cash crop is opium poppies, which produce 90 percent of the world's opium and account for 40 percent of the GDP of Afghanistan. There is no middle class, rampant graft, and deep-rooted ethnic and tribal rivalries. Growing a democracy in this hostile environment will make the nation building effort in Iraq look easy. Yet Obama persists with no exit strategy and an open-ended commitment funded by hundreds of billions of dollars the U.S. taxpayer will have to borrow. We are bogged down in Afghanistan with no specific goals much less a plan for victory. At the same NATO meeting where Europe gave lip service but no real help for Afghanistan, Obama also backed away from the U.S. promise to include Ukraine in NATO – a key concession to the Russians who ignored Obama's plea for Russian help to keep the Iranians from using the nuclear bomb the Russians helped them develop. The Iranians were amazed to be included in new talks promoted by the Obama administration to try negotiating with the "good" Taliban in Afghanistan. The Iranians, at the same time, sent scientists and technicians to help the North Koreans launch an ICBM potentially capable of obliterating Los Angeles. [Continue reading]

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