Panetta to inherit Afghanistan dilemma … With Americans still coming home in flag-draped caskets from Iraq, CIA director Leon Panetta (left) revealed a surprising – and to many, no doubt, confusing – fact. "There are 1,000 al-Qaeda that are still in Iraq," he said. "We saw the attack that was just made the other day. It too continues to be a fragile situation." That's right – 1,000 al-Qaeda in Iraq where the U.S. has fewer than 50,000 troops. In Afghanistan, where there are twice as many American troops, intelligence estimates put the number of al Qaeda at no more than 100, reports CBS News senior national security correspondent David Martin. – Reuters
Dominant Social Theme: It's a long, hard road to victory.
Free-Market Analysis: Americans are war-weary but Leon Panetta (left) sees reasons to fight on. Al-Qaeda is still active and as long as al-Qaeda exists (see above article excerpt) America needs to fight. The struggle is taking place "Over There," so Americans do not have to fight al-Qaeda "Over Here." CIA Director Panetta made his remarks on Capitol Hill where he attended a hearing regarding his confirmation as Secretary of Defence.
But as we shall explore in this article, something else needs to be done because the apparently phony War on Terror is not providing the momentum for militarism that, say, Germany provided during World War II. As a dominant theme it is proving unconvincing for the moment.
The West cannot count on the al-Qaeda threat as currently constituted to continue to justify the trillions that the wars are costing.
The West – or more specifically Western elites – needs al-Qaeda and the War on Terror. It is very convenient for Anglo-American power elites trying to consolidate world rule. Wherever there is resistance, there is al-Qaeda. Wherever there is al-Qaeda the West may strike. Wherever the West strikes, it tries to consolidate power and authority. The idea, apparently, is to use military force to consolidate One World Government.
Anglosphere elites have laid the groundwork for this all-encompassing government through various global entities such as the United Nations. But having created the architecture, these ambitious elites now have to ensure that their grand vision is populated. If people won't cooperate voluntarily, force is to be used.
Of course we disagree with the idea of One World Government, even though Western elites have evidently held onto this vision for centuries. From what we can tell, the great intergenerational banking families of the Anglo-American power elite have been working on the concept for 300 years or more. We think the initial concept emerged in Venice around the 10th or 11th century but was refined in Britain around the 15th or 16th century with the advent of central banking.
What central banking showed the elites of the day was that if one could consolidate power and set up a central bank, then one could control the country through Money Power. Thus the idea of world government gradually emerged. One by one, countries would be taken over, central banks installed and the paraphernalia of regulatory democracy funded and expanded.
The clearest modern evidence can be seen in Afghanistan. Yes, there is an operative central bank in Afghanistan, even though it is relatively dysfunctional. There is a central bank in Iraq as well. There is even a central bank in Somalia! The bank was reopened in 2009 by the recently formed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) as part of a drive to "restore national institutions."
Bear in mind that the TFG controls a few hundred acres of contested land on the coast of Somalia – if that. But nonetheless, the first order of business, while the bullets are flying, was to open a central bank. That's because the majority of central banks in the world, over 100, are coordinated out of the Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements. It's a form of world government that's being built quietly and methodically.
The Western mainstream media is filled with memes about civil society generally, and a major one of course is the relative superiority of the Western model of finance and literacy. But in Europe and America this can be seen nowadays as a questionable in our view, where up to 50 percent of certain portions of the population are out of work and dependent on shrinking government subsidies.
The Western model is NOT in fact capitalist; it is statist – a statist model that is actually failing. The capitalist society is in fact something of a false front for the elite's accumulation of power. This is why we have called what the Anglo-American elite accomplished in the 20th century a Dreamtime. Using central-banking surges of fiat money, the elites created whole phony industries – automobiles, airlines and of course technology.
These industries would have emerged anyway, but likely not with such speed and viciousness. Mass-production in our view is something of a fiat-money phenomenon. The great surges of paper money that central banks are capable of producing distort whole economies and give people a false idea of what business is like.
Having pried people off the land with the lure of "white collar" jobs that disappear when the business cycle turns, the Western elites have created a massive group of hundreds of millions who are dependent for portions of their lives on government institutions. Many people are merely one paycheck or one government program away from food insecurity.
The elites have also succeeded in disrupting the community support networks of charities and churches that might take care of people in times of need. The state has taken over these functions and does a poor job of it. Phony industries, degrading paper money, dysfunctional higher education and ephemeral professional jobs – all this is the result of 20th century civilization.
The idea is to make the mass of citizenry helpless and afraid; this helps with the imposition of world government; but contrast this to the failed states that the West is attacking in Somalia, Afghanistan and now, apparently, Yemen. These are primarily agrarian societies with clan and tribal cultures. Justice is familial and local (out of the hands of the state) and money if used (rather than barter) may have a component of gold and silver.
These cultures are successful in the sense that they are self-supporting and the lives of the people within them are not controlled by surges of paper money. It is easy to look down on such people as uncivilized and illiterate savages, but there are elements within these societies that have their roots in a valid past.
We can also see in successful modern countries like Switzerland some of the same facets. Land is held by individual farmers, power is held at the level of cantons and townships and there is yet a significant apprenticeship culture (many young men aspire to a trade rather than a degree).
The idea that elites have tried to inculcate throughout the West is that fiat money, a university education and a capitalist approach to problems constitute advanced civilization. But with the economic collapse of 2008, every part of this agenda has been called into question.
As Anglosphere elites see the credibility of their economic and cultural tools being questioned, they have returned, as before, to war. This is a repetitive phenomenon. Whenever the elites' program is challenged, the larger society suddenly begins to suffer from chaos and militarism.
The problems that the elites are facing today, however, are sizable. World war in our view is out of the question because of nuclear weapons. This is apparently why the elites have embarked on their phony War on Terror. Additionally, a regional war is surely possible, perhaps even a nuclear one between Israel and the Arab world. We covered that possibility here: Regional War or World War?
The problem facing the elites now is that the war on Afghanistan is not succeeding. An expansion of the war to Pakistan-proper is going to be met with resistance from both the Punjabis and domestic Western populations and further wars are problematic as well.
Iraq is beginning to seethe again. Afghanistan is slipping away; Libya is not going well; Somalia remains unresolved and now apparently the theatre of war has expanded to Yemen, where the CIA also claims to detect "al-Qaeda." One wonders how the Pentagon and NATO officials are going to handle the general war-weariness of the West as they continue to start new conflicts in order to fully pacify and dominate this area of the world.
If one looks at the theatre of the War on Terror, it now encompasses much of the Middle East and Upper Africa. With French interference into the Affairs of the Ivory Coast, that part of Africa has been destabilized as well. Another area of rising conflict is the Sudan, where the UN – an Anglo-American tool – managed to effectuate a division of the country, which itself leads to further conflict.
Increasingly, Western populations will not tolerate these wars – four of them, today, and perhaps 600 areas of conflict around the world. They are both unjustified and unjustifiable. For this reason, it seems to us that Western elites will either withdraw or escalate. While we would like to predict a de-escalation, give the Anglosphere elite's determination to move ahead with world-governance, we would not rule out some sort of false-flag event that can be used to leverage the regional war that the elites are evidently starting. We've written about one such scenario here: Upcoming US Nuclear Event?
How does Panetta feel about disengaging? "That decision really does rest with General Petraeus and Secretary Gates and the president," Panetta said at his hearing. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates seems is no hurry to leave either. During an interview with "60 Minutes" he said any Afghan withdrawals should not lower combat troops.
The West is weary of war and so is the American public (and Europe as well). And yet the number of wars that the elites apparently demand continues to escalate. There is an apparent contradiction here and as Ayn Rand famously pointed out, such reality-based contradictions cannot exist. Either these wars, with their intolerable expenses will subside, or they will escalate regardless. The question becomes, then, how will such disparate conflicts be further engaged. What will it take?
