I began telling people we will begin to lose in Afghanistan last year
as well as Iraq for the reasons pointed out in these two articles.
This is simply history repeating itself. Power hungry fools following
mandates of the "League of Nations" / UN.

2 Related Articles on History Repeating Itself (Cycles) and LESSON NOT
LEARNED.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18250.htm
History Repeats in Iraq and The Lost Drug War..
History Repeats in Iraq / Afghanistan. 90 years later.

"When Iraq becomes strong enough in our opinion to stand alone, we
shall be in a position to state that our task has been fulfilled, and
that Iraq is an independent sovereign state. But this cannot be said
while we are forced year after year to spend very large sums of money
on helping the Iraqi government to defend itself and maintain
order." Winston Churchill 1922.

Just 3 years after abandoning Afghanistan in 1919 because they could
not hold it. The British were in deep trouble in "Iraq" , which was
nothing more than a area of different tribes and religions drawn on a
map and not a country, they were going broke and losing many lives
trying to hold on to it. Sound familiar? Perhaps like something
you've heard from a stay-the-course advocate, circa 2004-7?

The BBC is now reporting that British Troops say Iraq is unwinnable
and Afghanistan is turning because of the new drug war and will go the
same way. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6961380.stm

The order may be different but history repeats itself again and man
learns nothing. We will lose Afghanistan and snatch defeat from
victory by extending the war on drugs as mandated by the UN to the
Afghan farmer, rather than licensing their crop for medical use in the
world wide morphine shortage in less developed countries. But, that
is another story, back to Iraq.
Winston Churchill in 1922 as head of Britain's Colonial Office wrote
the above quote. At the time, Prince Feisal - whom Churchill had
appointed king of the nascent nation of Iraq, whose borders Churchill
had drawn up the previous year - was balking at the protectorate
agreement the British wanted. To rule a land and people with whom he
was largely unfamiliar, Feisal, a native of the Arabian Peninsula and
not the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, and who had spent much
of his life in Turkish Constantinople, needed legitimacy - and as much
independence from the British as he could get. Which is much the same
problem that the American-supported government and army of Iraq are
having today. That, and the above quote, are just two among endless
parallels between the British experience in Iraq and the American
experience 80-plus years later - as reported in Churchill's Folly, by
historian Christopher Catherwood (2004, Carroll & Graf). It wasn't
written yet when the Bush administration invaded Iraq in 2003, but the
information was there for the learning if anyone in the White House
had cared to pursue it. E-mail subject: Things To Avoid in Iraq! For
this book, Catherwood relies heavily on the archived letters and memos
written by the remarkably prolific Churchill.

A brief bit of background that is necessary to understand the current
situation: The Ottoman Empire based in modern-day Turkey ruled from
1299 until 1920, at its peak controlling three continents. Already
with their empire in decline, the Ottomans sided with Germany in World
War I, and in its defeated aftermath saw remnants of the empire
subdivided, with Western nations given "mandates" by the League of
Nations to govern various areas. The United States was given present-
day Armenia, but the isolationist administration of President Woodrow
Wilson - the U.S. was not even a member of the League of Nations -
chose not to get involved. THEY SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO RON PAUL.

The French got what today is Syria and Lebanon, and the Brits got what
is now Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, among other real estate. A map
of the region before Churchill convened what he called his "40
Thieves" in Cairo in April 1921 to draw up new national boundaries
shows not countries, but tribal areas - the Ibn Saud clan ruling the
Nejd on the Arabian Peninsula and the rival Hussein clan ruling the
neighboring Hejaz along the Red Sea, to name the largest two. They
often skirmished, and the Sauds also had their eyes on what would
become Kuwait.
Note: The Husseins, also known as Hashemites and unrelated to Saddam,
are descended from the prophet Mohammed and held the position of
Sharif of Mecca. They are key characters in the film Lawrence of
Arabia and the book about the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans on
which it is based, Seven Pillars of Wisdom - although Catherwood says
the historical details of both are quite wrong and based largely on
the fantasies of T.E. Lawrence. Nevertheless, Churchill dragged the
old desert soldier out of retirement, and Lawrence became one of those
"40 Thieves," and much responsible for Churchill agreeing to put
Hussein's son Feisal on the new Iraqi throne (after he tried usurping
the new throne in Syria until the French kicked him out). Feisal's
brother Abdullah would become king of the new country of Jordan.
Call it arrogance, perhaps: Churchill had never actually visited what
was then called Mesopotamia when he arbitrarily drew up the borders
for a new land called Iraq, doing so in Egypt, although he did visit
Jerusalem.

And while Catherwood writes that Churchill was well aware of Sunni-
Shia differences in the region, he ignored them as well as tribal
boundaries. Thus Churchill, the classic colonialist, brought a Sunni
from outside Iraq to rule a country that was two-thirds Shia.
As for the Kurds in the north, they were Sunni but not Arabic. The "40
Thieves" discussed creating a separate Kurdish nation, but failed to
do so - Kurdish homelands were split between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and
Syria - to the continuing detriment of the Kurdish people.
In short: Three nations - for Shia, Sunni and Kurds - could have been
created at a time when Arab nationalism was rising, and such an idea
might have been popular. Or the Brits could have simply let those
tribal lands revert to their traditional ways. But that is not the way
of empires, and today the Iraqis - and Americans - are paying for it.

Oil was not yet an issue for the Brits - Iraqi oil was just
speculation in 1922 - but they had their own economic self-interest
there. As Colonial secretary, Churchill was interested in Iraq because
it would save several days in the time it took to send troops and
goods from England to India, then the UK's prize colony. And
Churchill, Catherwood shows again and again, was chiefly interested in
saving the British Empire money - call it empire on the cheap.

Thus it was that troop levels were always an issue, with British
generals saying that far more troops were necessary to stabilize Iraq
than Churchill and politicians in London wanted to hear. Ask retired
Gen. Eric Shinseki if that sounds familiar.

Feisal would turn out to be a terrible choice for reasons greater than
his religion. He was simply not a good ruler, his administration
disorganized at best. That said, as Catherwood points out, the British
presence that lasted until 1932 never allowed Feisal any true
legitimacy in the eyes of the Iraqi people. Who's in charge here? He
died in 1933, succeeded by the young playboy King Ghazi.

Churchill's formula created inherent instability in Iraq - in the
nation's first 37 years, there were 58 different governments! The
bloody Baathist overthrow of 1958 ended the Hashemite monarchy, and
especially after Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979 would show that
only an iron-fisted dictator could hold a country of such disparate
parts together.
So what might this history mean for America and Iraq?

Iraq was never a nation of ideals, or dreams, or unified core beliefs
or ethnicity. It was drawn on a map by a English man who never
visited the place. Was aware it was a loose collection of tribes
under a protectorate agreement with the "League of Nations." (ancient
UN). We are there enforcing U.N. resolutions. Ron Paul understands
this history and how wrong it is to subjugate our authority to the
U.N.

Today, the people of Iraq still identify themselves more by tribal
and religious affiliation than as patriotic Iraqis. They may cheer the
Iraqi soccer team, because they love soccer and it's the only team
they have, but they don't get goose bumps when they hear their
national anthem.
And the concept of democracy does not resonate; they are content with
a system that offers security, and a religion that provides answers
for life's vagaries.

It seems unlikely to the point of impossibility that the Shia
majority, dominated by a Sunni minority going back to the Ottomans and
then by a Western-appointed monarchy followed by a military
dictatorship, will ever give up the dominance they now and newly
enjoy. Share power?
It seems equally unlikely that the long-dominant Sunnis would allow
themselves to become a persecuted minority, or that the Kurds of Iraq,
with a strong regional government now in place and lots of oil
underfoot, would be willing to be dominated by Arabs of either Muslim
stripe. And why share?

And it seems there is no essential reason for these very different
people to find a unifying cause other than oil profits. But that would
involve sharing, and that's a problem.

Whether it was the British in 1921 or Americans today, Western powers
have dictated what Iraq is and what Iraqi policy should be. The stated
Bush agenda to establish democracy in Iraq is a lovely idea, but so is
money growing on trees. For Iraqis, democracy is not a golden ideal,
but just another Western concept being forced upon them by violent
means. (Man they should have listened to Ron Paul)

Even if some kind of democracy prevails in Iraq, expect it to act
rather as Feisal did with the Brits who put him in power: ungrateful.
There was never a pro-British government under the Hashemite monarchy,
and there is not likely to be a pro-American government that follows
our exit.

Whether U.S. troops leave Iraq tomorrow or next year or even beyond
that, it's highly unlikely that ancient tribal and religious
identities will be superseded by national pride.
As Catherwood points out, whether it was artificially configured
Yugoslavia or the French creation of Lebanon, nations drawn up by
outside forces are never successful for very long. The U.S. invasion
of Iraq and the bloody chaos it set loose seems to bear out that
historical verity.
Yes, Iraqi oil is our economic self-interest, and a very serious one,
but this should give Americans even more reason to find other ways to
power our cars, homes and businesses, and our nation. (Water Power
Cars and Permanent Magnetic Motors developed and suppressed)
Bottom line: I can't see any way that America can get out of Iraq
without the serious involvement and cooperation of the Arabic Sunni
Saudis, the Persian Shia Iranians and the Sunni Turks - a treaty
between those traditional regional rivals allowing Sunni, Shia and
Kurdish home-lands in the former Iraq would be a good start, and would
provide a sort of buffer among those powers.
We need Iran to get out peacefully.

It is better for Israel and the United States for us and them to have
a strong military and deterrent effect. Strong Military "ready" to
kick ass, not tired from policing activities. Not involved in a
conflict. The Military was very strong until G.W. fixed that by
invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11!

As Ron Paul points out 9/11 was caused primarily because the United
States Government made it policy for hijacked planes not to resist and
took away the right of airlines to have guns in the cockpit. So a few
radicals with box cutters were able to hijack 4 planes. And, do
incredible damage.

And I can't see a way out of Iraq without finally letting the people
of the region redraw their own borders. They've been subject to
outside dominance since 1299 - a mere 708 years. They could hardly do
any worse than Western meddlers have done.

Will there be bloodshed as they sort it out? To answer with a double
question: Is there unconscionable bloodshed happening in Iraq now? And
how else do you propose to stop it?

THE LOST DRUG WAR... WHY WE WILL LOSE AFGHANISTAN.

The Lost Drug War &
We've Spent 36 Years and Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug
Trade Keeps Growing
By Misha Glenny Sunday, August 19, 2007
Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Docherty
noticed when he arrived in Afghanistan's turbulent Helmand province in
April 2006. "They were growing right outside the gate of our Forward
Operating Base," he told me. Within two weeks of his deployment to
the remote town of Sangin, he realized that "poppy is the economic
mainstay and everyone is involved right up to the higher echelons of
the local government."
Poppy, of course, is the plant from which opium -- and heroin -- are
derived. Docherty was quick to realize that the military push into
northern Helmand province was going to run into serious trouble. The
rumor was "that we were there to eradicate the poppy," he said. "The
Taliban aren't
stupid and so they said, 'These guys are here to destroy your
livelihood, so let's take up arms against them.' And it's been a
downward spiral since then."
Despite the presence of 35,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, the drug
trade there is going gangbusters. According to the U.N. Office on
Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghan opium
production in 2006 rose a staggering 57 percent over the previous
year. Next month, the United Nations is expected to release a report
showing an additional 15 percent jump in opium production this year
while highlighting the sobering fact that Afghanistan now accounts
for 95 percent of the world's poppy crop. But the success of the
illegal narcotics industry isn't confined to Afghanistan. Business is
booming in South America, the Middle East, Africa and across the
United States.
Thirty-six years and hundreds of billions of dollars after President
Richard M. Nixon launched the war on drugs, consumers worldwide are
taking more narcotics and criminals are making fatter profits than
ever before. The syndicates that control narcotics production and
distribution reap the profits from an annual turnover of $400 billion
to $500 billion. And terrorist organizations such as the Taliban are
using this money to expand their operations and buy ever more
sophisticated weapons, threatening Western security.
In the past two years, the drug war has become the Taliban's most
effective recruiter in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Muslim extremists
have reinvigorated themselves by supporting and taxing the countless
peasants who are dependent one way or another on the opium trade,
their only reliable source of income. The Taliban is becoming richer
and stronger by the day, especially in the east and south of the
country. The "War on Drugs" is defeating the "war on
terror."
For the past three years, I have been traveling the world researching
a book on the jaw-dropping rise of transnational organized crime since
the collapse of communism and the advent of globalization. I have
witnessed how a ferocious drug gang mounted an assault on Sao Paolo,
closing the city for three days as citizens cowered at home. I have
watched Bedouins shift hundreds of kilos of cocaine across the
Egyptian-Israeli border on the backs of camels, and observed how
South Africa and West Africa have become an international narcotics
distribution hub.
The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy.
And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims,
academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on
drugs is the underlying cause of the misery. Everywhere, that is,
except Washington, here a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned
the issue into a political third rail.
The problem starts with prohibition, the basis of the war on drugs.
The theory is that if you hurt the producers and consumers of drugs
badly enough, they'll stop doing what they're doing. But instead, the
trade goes underground, which means that the state's only contact
with it is through
law enforcement, i.e. busting those involved, whether producers,
distributors or users. But so vast is the demand for drugs in the
United States, the European Union and the Far East that nobody has
anything approaching the ability to police the trade.
Prohibition gives narcotics huge added value as a commodity. Once
traffickers get around the business risks -- getting busted or being
shot by competitors -- they stand to make vast profits. A confidential
strategy report prepared in 2005 for British Prime Minister Tony
Blair's cabinet and
later leaked to the media offered one of the most damning indictments
of the efficacy of the drug war. Law enforcement agencies seize less
than 20 percent of the 700 tons of cocaine and 550 tons of heroin
produced annually. According to the report, they would have to seize
60 to 80 percent to make the industry unprofitable for the
traffickers. Supply is so plentiful that the price of a gram of heroin
is plummeting in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom. As for
cocaine, according to the UNODC, the street price of a gram in the
United States is now less than $70, compared with $184 in 1990.
Adjusted for inflation, that's a threefold drop.
A surfeit of bananas drove 47-year-old Colombian Susan Castillo to do
business with terrorists. "It was about 10 to 15 years ago," she told
me. "We had built our farm and raised our seven children on corn and
bananas. But suddenly nobody wanted to buy our bananas anymore. We did
what
everybody did then -- we switched from bananas and corn to coca.
Actually, we did not grow the coca ourselves but we rented out our
land to a cocalero and he grew the crop." Both the Castillo family and
the grower paid tax to the FARC -- the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, a
17,000-strong peasant-based army, by far the largest terrorist
organization in the Southern Hemisphere.
I spoke to Castillo in the bare office of a local U.N.counseling
center in Ciudad Bolivar, a sprawling refugee camp that extends south
from Bogota and houses about 1 million people. A few weeks earlier,
she had been forced to leave her home after a pitched battle between
the Colombian military and the FARC near La Macarena National Park.
Next to the U.N. office stands a spanking new library, courtesy of
Plan Colombia, the $4.7 billion worth of drug-fighting assistance that
the United States gave to Colombia over the first half-decade of this
new century. Ninety-eight percent of that money was devoted to beefing
up
the Colombian armed forces' assault on coca plantations and left-wing
guerrillas. I was rather pleased to uncover one of its few civilian
outlets. All the library needs now is to open (it was padlocked), a
few books (there were none) and some people who can read (a rare
species in Ciudad Bolivar).
According to the Government Accountability Office, 70 percent of the
money allotted to Plan Colombia never leaves the United States. It is
used to buy U.S.-built helicopters and other weapons for the military,
and a large chunk is paid to the security firm DynCorp. Britain and
other E.U. countries have so far resisted spraying Afghan poppy fields
with chemicals. But for several years, DynCorp has been spraying the
herbicide glyphosate on thousands of acres of
coca in Colombia.
The impact of the eradication program has been negligible at best. The
FARC not only continues to control a swath of territory the size of
Switzerland in south-central Colombia, but it has established itself
in the north as well. The United Nations has identified coca
plantations in 24 of the country's 32 provinces, whereas it was grown
in only six when spraying began. But most embarrassing of all, before
his trip to Washington in May, President Alvaro Uribe was forced to
announce that production of coca was up 8 percent in 2006. Coca
production has been so ample that the wholesale price of Colombia's
best-known export has continued to slide throughout the course of Plan
Colombia.
And now the U.S. government wants to repeat this "success" in Mexico.
There's talk in ashington about a $1 billion aid package for the
government of President Felipe Calderón to back his own war against
drugs. And in Mexico, it's definitely a war: Calderón has mobilized
the army to fight
traffickers. In the first half of this year, more than 1,000 people
were gunned down by rival drug cartels. Among the dead were newspaper
reporters, narcotics police investigators, judges and politicians.
The collapse of communism and the rise of globalization in the late
1980s and early 1990s gave transnational criminality a tremendous
boost. The expansion of world trade and financial markets has provided
criminals ample opportunity to broaden their activities. But there has
been no comparable increase in the ability of the Western world to
police global crime. International mobsters, unlike terrorists, don't
seek to bring down the West; they just want to make a buck. But these
two distinct species breed in the same swamps. In areas notorious for
crime, such as the tri-border region connecting Paraguay, Brazil and
Argentina, or in the blood-diamond conflict zones such as Sierra Leone
and Liberia, gangsters and terrorists habitually cooperate and work
alongside one another.
Those swamps are steadily seeping toward the United States. British
Columbia is now home to the greatest number of organized-crime
syndicates anywhere in the world (if we accept the U.N. definition of
a syndicate as more than two people involved in a planned crime).
According to B.C. government statistics, the production, distribution
and export of B.C. Bud, highly potent marijuana grown in hothouses
along the province's border with the United States, accounts for 6
percent of the region's gross domestic product. It now employs more
Canadians than British Columbia's traditional industries of mining and
logging combined.
(THIS IS ONE REASON "I" CYCLESURFER WAS VERY BULLISH THE CANADIAN
DOLLAR AND AGRICULTURE)
The majority of the province's criminals remain passive hippie types
for whom the drug is a lifestyle choice. But as Brian Brennan, the
chief investigator for the drug squad of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, told me, the marijuana trade is threatening to turn nasty as
British Columbia's Hells Angels, one of the best-organized criminal
syndicates in the world, moves in on the action. The drug trade is so
lucrative, he said, that when police seize growing operations in
houses worth $500,000, suspects simply abandon the properties. "They
are making so much money that they don't care about losing that
investment," he said. An avalanche of B.C. Bud rolls southward into
the United States every day, dodging U.S. customs in myriad
imaginative ways.
But as the Hells Angels and other syndicates get stronger and their
control over the port of Vancouver tightens, the ability of U.S. and
Canadian authorities to monitor the border becomes ever weaker.
Could anything replace the war on drugs? There's no easy answer. In
May, the Senlis Council, a group that works on the opium issue in
Afghanistan, argued that "current counter-narcotics policies . . .
have focused on poppy eradication, without providing farmers with
viable alternatives." Instead of eradication, the council, which is
made up of senior politicians and law enforcement officials from
Canada and Europe, concludes that Afghan farmers should be permitted
to grow opium that can then be refined and distributed for medical
purposes. (That's not going to happen, as the United States has
recently reiterated its commitment to poppy eradication.)
Others argue that the only way to minimize the criminality and social
distress that
drugs cause is to legalize narcotics so that the state may exert
proper control over the industry. It needs to be taxed and controlled,
they insist.
In Washington, the war on drugs has been a third-rail issue since its
inauguration. It's obvious why -- telling people that their kids can
do drugs is the kiss of death at the ballot box. But that was before
9/11. Now the drug war is undermining Western security throughout the
world. In one particularly revealing conversation, a senior official
at the British Foreign Office told me, "I often think we will look
back at the War on Drugs in a hundred years' time and tell the tale of
'The Emperor's New Clothes.' This is so stupid."
How right he is.
misha.gle...@which.net
Misha Glenny is a former BBC correspondent and the author of
"McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld," to be
published next year.