Web Letters: Obama Looses the Manhunters

I completely agree with Engelhardt. Obama hasn't done anything, so far, to make a dent in altering this country's assinine foreign policies, which are seeped deeply with the pure fact that we are the biggest, baddest country on the planet. Our military power is deployed all over the globe, and all this is all good, because the people of the US, 4 percent of the world's population, really do know how everyone else should be governed, and what kind of economic system would make them just like us. And if the people of a country want to be like the US, and if they organize enough to threaten their tyrannical government's grip on power, they turn to us for help, telling us they want to be a democracy like us, we'll send in the Marines, kill the bad guys, and then all those people will live just like Beaver's family on TV.

I haven't given up on Obama, although I wish he would be a little bit more of a dove, as he indicated he was going to be when I listened to him on the campaign trail. His overtures to the Islamic nation (and I think it is a "nation") have possibilities, but he has yet to make a definitive decision that his intent is to defuse the militarism that has engulfed the Greater Middle East for centuries, beginning with closing down the military empire that this country has spread around the globe.

All cultures, nations, throughout the history of organized human settlement have had a class of warriers whose purpose in life, was to conquer, occupy foreign lands to fill the coffers of the powerful with the booty of conquered countries, kill their enemies. The US has been Number One is this game for too long.

I'm holding my judgment about my C-in-C, but right now, he's too much of a warrier for my preferences.

Bill Richey

Aurora, CO

The article finishes by wondering why the imperial powers, especially the USA, have been so occupied with trying to bust Afghanistan over the last thirty years. How about this? It is the last sizable, cohesive, area of the planet where the major social, political, cultural decisions are still made by local, indigenous, tribal-affiliated "bosses," clan leaders, "strong men," etc. The big decisions are not being made by any members of the boards of directors of international corporations.

Whether or not Coca-Cola is sold in a local farmer's market is decided by the local bosses, not by the corporate regional director of Coca-Cola. If Monsanto seeds are planted, it is a decision made by the local farmer's tribal gathering, not by Monsanto's Asian marketing director. Get the idea?

If this "bad example" of independence from corporate domination is allowed to continue, there is the possibility that it may act as a blueprint for the "contamination" of neighboring regions.

Obviously, it is a brutal and flawed blueprint, based on oppression and seventeenth-century mores. But most important, it is a current and persistent challenge to the financial and economic hegemony of the brutal and demonstrably insane kleptomaniacs who control the international establishment today.

Just as any "socialist" area of the planet that strays too far outside of the corporate orbits of control is crushed by any means necessary, this last bastion of regional tribalism must be exterminated, for identical reasons.

Otherwise a possibility exists that it may evolve, and someday act as a possible transformative seed for an alternative narrative for the future.

Francis Louis Szot

Miami, FL