• War in Whose Interest?
    by CONN HALLINAN
    http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/19/war-in-whose-interest

    What is going on? Did some Greek open a box she shouldn’t have? Is the Obama administration—take your choice—incompetent? Trying to wind down two of America’s longest wars? Giving liberal cover to a neo-conservative strategy to re-institute a new cold war? Following an agenda?

    How about all of them?

    There certainly has been #incompetence. The 2009 surge into Afghanistan did nothing but kill a lot of people, and the Libya intervention substituted #Chaos Theory for diplomacy.

    It is also true that old wars are winding down. In 2008 there were 110,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and 182,000 in Iraq. By the end of 2014 there will be no U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and—at this time—only a handful in Iraq.

    Cover for the #neo-cons? The Obama administration did help engineer the coup in Ukraine, and Assistant Secretary of State #Victoria_Nuland —who oversaw the action and handpicked the interim coup president—was Dick Cheney’s principle foreign policy advisor.

    And the U.S. certainly has an #agenda, which may best be summed up by 19th century British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Henry Lord Palmerston—England’s hammer of empire, who oversaw the Opium Wars with China and the Crimean War with Russia: “We have no eternal allies and we have no eternal enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and these interests it is our duty to follow.”

    #intérêts