By Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald
said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two,
three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In
fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that
started out because the US didn't want the Commies to win a battle in
the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of
the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been
struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become
the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious--we had no
business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Pakistan: "The Most Dangerous Country" (Trailer)

Pakistan is in such a perilous state that Bruce Riedel, a foreign policy expert leading President Obama's Afghanistan review, has called it "the most dangerous country in the world today." Pakistan has nuclear weapons and a government disconnected from the poverty, malnutrition, and lack of healthcare afflicting its people. And though Pakistan remains a U.S. ally, tensions continue to rise as the U.S. considers broadening military strikes within Pakistan's borders. Part two of Rethink Afghanistan focuses on how the Afghanistan crisis affects Pakistan and all of us.

Click "Read more" for 11 min. movie essential for understanding the stakes in Afghanistan, petition, question submissions, and updates.

By Dave Lindorff

Barack Obama’s first address to Congress provided Americans with
yet another example of competent speechmaking, and I suppose, given
that we’ve just endured eight painful years of oratorical farce, being
able to listen to your president without wincing is something.

The problem is that the way forward proposed by the president as
laid out in this address was almost always half-hearted, wrong-headed
or doomed.

Obama declared at the outset of his address that the economic
crisis was the major issue confronting the country, and while one could
argue that this crisis is merely a symptom of much bigger issues, like
the nearly completed deindustrialization of the nation, the death grip
of militarism, and the growing political power of corporations, one
could also concede that there is an urgent need to deal with the
deepening recession.

By Dave Lindorff

Okay, I have to vent here. We all get a little crazy sitting alone
at our keyboards in this business, and it's finally gotten to me.

I know there are serious signs of a complete mental breakdown in the
US, with polls reporting that millions of people are actually excited
at having a low-rent religious fanatic who consistently mispronounces
pundit as "pundint" (shades of Dubya!), pilfers state funds for her
family's personal use, lies about her alleged opposition to Washington
pork, claims the bloody war in Iraq is "God's will," forces her
17-year-old daughter to make a momentary mistake into a lifetime one by
marrying the kid who got her pregnant, and refers to blacks as "sambo"
and to Alaska's indigenous people as "arctic arabs," running for vice
president on the ticket with a man who is a walking medical disaster
waiting to happen.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is horrifying in terms of its violence against the people of Pakistan - and terrifying in terms of the possibility of Pakistan spinning into chaos with loose nukes and murderous fundamentalists.

Of course I can't add any insights into the who and why and the consequences for Pakistan and the world - nor can many Americans.

But let me add my $.02 on one topic in the news - which U.S. Presidential candidates will benefit the most.

Without a doubt, those candidates are Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, and Ron Paul.

Why? Because they are the three candidates who want to get out of Iraq quickly and completely, and let the Iraqis solve their own problems, rather than continue the bloody, expensive, and self-defeating U.S. occupation.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune that he has a "gut feeling" that the US has entered into a new period of increased risk of terrorism.

Let me get this straight - Chertoff has a "gut feeling" that the US is on the verge of another terrorism attack.

I'm getting a gut feeling that this is a impending Wag the Dog operation as Bush continues to feel the increasing public scorn for his commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence, the mounting public opinion against the war, the plummeting Bush-Cheney public approval ratings, the defection of Republican senators from the "all war, all the time" Bush war agenda, the backlash from claiming executive privilege for the RNC emails originating in the White House, the White House refusal to allow aides to testify before congress, the burgeoning congressional investigations...those are just a few of the high points from which it's important to distract the public's attention.

But there's more, and even more reason to be concerned about the Bush administration's handling of national security. ABCNews is reporting that an alQaeda cell is either in or en route to the US.

A War On Terrorism or a War Of Terrorism?

Reports as usual vary wildly and small wonder that some news sources are trying to pin this on yet another subsidiary of "Al Qaeda". But this wasn't a suicide attack.

The terrorists drove a car, packed with explosives, up to a bus carrying soldiers of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Some reports say that they forced the bus to stop by firing on it with automatic weapons, others that they blocked the road with the car while pretending to have broken down. Either way, they quickly escaped on motorbikes before detonating the car bomb by remote control.

Bush Greeted in Pakistan by Demonstrations, Nation-wide Strike

Juan Cole writes:

Bush arrived in Islamabad to find it eerily quiet. The Islamic Action Council, which includes a group that helped train the Taliban, had called for a nation-wide strike to protest the visit. Streets of many cities were said to be strangely quiet, while in the northern Pushtun city of Peshawar, thousands marched in protest.

Senior Pakistani officials told the U.S. on Saturday that the air strike on a Pakistani village last week cannot be repeated and that the two countries must find a way to work in a more bilateral way to avoid loss of civilian life.

The strike last week on the tiny Pakistani village of Damadola, in the tribal territory of Bajur, is believed to have assassinated some key al Qaeda operatives while also killing many civilians, including five young children.

"What happened in Bajur must not be repeated," Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri told U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns on Saturday.

Pakistan's ruling party got together yesterday and demanded an apology for a CIA airstrike that was designed to get Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, but instead killed at least 17 Pakistani civilians, including five children.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and his ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q condemned the U.S. airstrike on the tiny village of Damadola, near the Afghan border. America was apparently targeting al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahri and talk of the bad guy's death was the focal point of national news going into the weekend.

It now looks like al-Zawahri wasn't even in the neighborhood.