The Decaying of America.

The funny thing about the US this days... is that no matter who people vote for... bush seems to win... so you´re throwing your vote away anyway.

 

In response to SA

the late 80s and 90s were a very good time for america. Before reagan america under carter was in the dumps. Whatever Reagan did had an incredible payoff.

In simple terms it was called the peace dividend and tax cuts and a new beginning.

As far as spending so much on the military. it was that expenditure that allowed Gorbachev to change the soviet system. Acting like that spending was anything but brilliant and effective is simply the mark a revisionist with an agenda. (Most likely ultra liberal because even the liberals gave Reagan his due when he died.

 

.

July 29, 2006

SouthAmerica: Reply to Jem

Even with all the defense spending done by the Soviet Union during all these years of the cold war – Afghanistan turned out to become the “Achilles Heal” of the Soviet Union.

In the same way that since 2003 Iraq has been turning out to be the “Achilles Heal” of the United States. It is a case of history repeats itself.

A superpower spends heavily on defense then gets engulfed in a war that can’t win with a minor country with inferior weapons, and after wasting a lot of time and money and getting a lot of soldiers killed and severely wounded the superpower withdraw its troops and accepts defeat.

Example: Soviet Union in Afghanistan – and the United States first in Vietnam, and now in Iraq and the Middle East. The difference is that in Iraq the entire world is watching live on television and they can see how helpless the US situation is - a picture is worth a thousand words.

History will show how Afghanistan and Iraq has turned out to be the killers of the “superpowers” and the end of the line for the last two Empires.

Yes, what happened in Afghanistan during a period of 10 years (1979 – 1988) it had something to do with the decline and demise of the Soviet Union.

By the way, I am not revising history – these are the real historical facts.

If you want to credit Ronald Reagan with the Soviet Union defeat in Afghanistan - then you also need to give credit to Osama Bin Ladden since the US provided the weapons but Bin Ladden was the one who did the dirty work. (At that time he was considered a terrorist by the Soviets, but he was a terrorist on the United States payroll - and he was considered a good terrorist by the US in the 1980's.)



**************


Afghanistan:


Area Comparative: slightly smaller than Texas


Land Boundaries: total: 5,529 km
border countries: China 76 km, Iran 936 km, Pakistan 2,430 km, Tajikistan 1,206 km, Turkmenistan 744 km, Uzbekistan 137 km


Population: 31,056,997 (July 2006 est.)


Age Structure:

0-14 years: 44.6% (male 7,095,117/female 6,763,759)
15-64 years: 53% (male 8,436,716/female 8,008,463)
65 years and over: 2.4% (male 366,642/female 386,300) (2006 est.)


Ethnic Groups: Pashtun 42%, Tajik 27%, Hazara 9%, Uzbek 9%, Aimak 4%, Turkmen 3%, Baloch 2%, other 4%

The country's nearly impassable mountainous and desert terrain is reflected in its ethnically and linguistically singular population.


Religions: Sunni Muslim 80%, Shi'a Muslim 19%, other 1%

Note: That is why Osama Bin Ladden went to Afghanistan to help the Sunnis – he is a devout Sunni and Al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization.


Languages: Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 50%, Pashtu (official) 35%, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11%, 30 minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai) 4%, much bilingualism


Literacy: definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 36%
male: 51%
female: 21% (1999 est.)



**************



Afghanistan History:


The longest period of stability in Afghanistan was between 1933 and 1973, when the country was under the rule of King Zahir Shah. However, in 1973, Zahir's brother-in-law, Sardar Mohammed Daoud launched a bloodless coup. Daoud and his entire family were murdered in 1978 when the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan launched a coup known as the Great Saur Revolution and took over the government.

Opposition against, and conflict within, the series of communist governments that followed, was considerable. As part of a Cold War strategy, in 1979 the United States government under President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski began to covertly fund and train anti-government Mujahideen forces through the Pakistani secret service agency known as Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which were derived from discontented Muslims in the country who opposed the official atheism of the Marxist regime, in 1978.

Brzezinski's recruiting efforts included enlisting Usama bin Laden to fight the Soviets. Bin Laden became a stinger missile expert in this war earning the nom de guerre "The Archer." In order to bolster the local Communist forces the Soviet Union - citing the 1978 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighborliness that had been signed between the two countries in 1978 - intervened on December 24, 1979. The Soviet occupation resulted in a mass exodus of over 5 million Afghans who moved into refugee camps in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. More than 3 million alone settled in Pakistan.

Faced with mounting international pressure and the loss of approximately 15,000 Soviet soldiers as a result of Mujahideen opposition forces trained by the United States, Pakistan, and other foreign governments, the Soviets withdrew ten years later, in 1989.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a nine-year war between the Soviet forces and the anti-government Mujahideen insurgents that were fighting to depose Afghanistan's Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government. The Soviet Union supported the government while the insurgents found support from a variety of sources including the United States and Pakistan.

The initial Soviet deployment of the 40th Army into Afghanistan took place on December 25, 1979, and the final troop withdrawal took place between May 15, 1988, and February 2, 1989. On February 15, 1989, the Soviet Union announced that all of its troops had departed the country.

The Soviet withdrawal was seen as an ideological victory in the U.S., which ostensibly had backed the Mujahideen through 3 bipartisan US Presidential Administrations in order to counter Soviet influence in the vicinity of the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Following the removal of the Soviet forces in 1989, the U.S. and its allies lost interest in Afghanistan and did little to help rebuild the war-ravaged country or influence events there. The USSR continued to support the regime of Dr. Najibullah (formerly the head of the secret service, Khad) until its downfall in 1992. However, the absence of the Soviet forces resulted in the downfall of the government as it steadily lost ground to the guerrilla forces.

As the vast majority of the elites and intellectuals had either been systematically eliminated by the Communists, or escaped to take refuge abroad, a dangerous leadership vacuum came into existence. Fighting continued among the various Mujahideen factions, eventually giving rise to a state of warlordism. The chaos and corruption that dominated post-Soviet Afghanistan in turn spawned the rise of the Taliban (mainly pashtun tribe of afghanistan) in response to the growing chaos.


.

 

How do you figure that "america under carter was in the dumps"? What objective notions lead you to this belief? Because Reagan told you so? We had some inflation that was primarily caused by a flood of money pumped into the system during the Nixon Administration, an adjustment to floating currencies, and the effects of a united OPEC oil embargo resulting from our support of Israel. During this period did we somehow cease to have a high standard of living relative to the rest of the world?, or somehow lose our superpower status? Just how was America "in the dumps" under Carter?

 

You didn’t get it. I was pointing out the fact that you are a slave to conspiracy theories. By the way, you need to fix your link to the videos.

And I’ll ask you again: how is the Neocon and the Zionist more dangerous to the West than the Islamofacist?

 

Many factors come into play in the demise of a superpower. You say it yourself when you say that Afghanistan "had something to do" with the end of the USSR or that it "turned out to be its killer". It says that it was at least a symptom, but not necessarily a cause. If you die of the flue when you're 90 yo, did you die because of the flue, or because you were 90 yo? The USSR didn't survive its defeat in Afghanistan but the USA survived its defeat in Vietnam. I wouldn't jump to conclusions with Iraq, so far the US have been prompt to get back on their feet - whether or not they are nowadays made of clay, future will tell.

 

On your argument about the foreign debt... you forgett to mention that almost all countries have debts beyond their paying capabiities and almost none of them plans to pay those debts. The US is no exception.

 

Tell me a good reason why Americans need to blindly support Israel in its instigations?

Lets look at the foreign policy aspect of it.

America needs Oil. Lots of it. Does Israel have oil? Nope.
So who has the Oil there? The Semitic Arabs and the Persians. They have tons of it. Does it matter if the Semites have democracy? Not one bit, who cares.

If the Americans were to publicy re nounce all support for Israel tomorrow, the Semites would not have any reason to go to war with the Americans. ( And please don't give me that bullshit that Israel acts as "buffer" against Radical Islam, because it does'nt. Israel only encourages radical Islam to instigate the semetic populations agaisnt the Americans).

In short, the reason why Americans are on the verge of spending 1 Trillion on subduing the Semites to get to their Oil is because of american unconditional support for Israel.


Lets look at the Domestic policy aspect of it.

You don't think there is a problem when less than 1% of the population controls the levers of power?

Watch the videos, you'll learn something. There is always 2 sides to any story. The problem is the stories you're listening to at the moment comes from the side that controls American government.

http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=73717


The only answer why most Americans support Israel blindly is because of RELIGIOUS Reasons. Even then the religious interpretations are rather tenuous and propagated primarily by Televangelists, ( Interestingly not one of them reads from the King James. They're all into the American Standard Version. Hmm, I wonder who edited that one! LOL )

 

So then the question becomes:

Who controls these debts? To whom is the interest being paid on these perpetual debts going to?

 

The answer is far from simple. It´s pretty much anyone who owns a bond... but you´re probably refering to who controls the vast mayority of it... we can only speculate.