Dr. King Had Other Dreams

Co-written by Tom and Judy Turnipseed

 On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. Martin Luther King Jr. was 26 years old; Coretta had just given birth to their first child.

 E D. Dixon, another Montgomery pastor, asked to host a meeting in King’s Dexter Street Baptist Church—not because of King, but because the church was the closest to downtown--across from the capitol. King attended the poorly planned meeting, was reluctantly drawn in, and his greatness began to emerge. It wasn’t necessarily the perfect time for him--he was young with a new family, not much money or a lot of experience.

He even, at a critical point in his life, hesitated. On our Unitarian Universalist Living Legacy Pilgrimage this past fall, we sat at the very table in his kitchen where he sat, uncertain of himself, discouraged, and frightened for his family by all the threatening calls they had received. He almost called it quits that night. In the middle of his doubts, he had his “Kitchen Epiphany” when he faced down his fears with the conviction that God stands by those who stand for justice. The world doesn’t need a perfect person to do what he did. The world needed him. And this week we celebrate the 84th birthday of this leader of nonviolent protest, freedom fighter and hero in the struggle for civil rights and racial justice.

 He led waves of ordinary, courageous people on the streets of the South from the bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, voter registrations drives, to the Freedom rides. In the face of overwhelming odds King knew those ordinary people needed a dream like all people do – one that speaks to our spirits through both our heads and our hearts. And because he knew that, on August 28, 1963, he stood at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington before 125,000 people and delivered one of the most well known and quoted speeches ever made and maybe the greatest.

 ”I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

 I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

 I have a dream today”.

 But Dr. King had other dreams.

 We forget that King had a dream beyond racial justice. He also believed that we can overcome war itself, as he hinted at in Oslo in 1964 and later. He dreamed that man would find an alternative to war and violence between nations just as he was finding a way to put an end to racial injustice. The madness must cease.

 President Obama, in his Nobel Prize speech, expressed the view that we’re stuck with war and there’s nothing we can do about it, indeed that it is often justified. Dr. King in his Nobel speech made it clear that he believed our destiny is ours to choose. “World peace through non-violent means is neither absurd nor unattainable,” he said. He knew—as we UU’s know “that we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality and whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” He tells us that we must either “learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”

He became more and more convinced that he had to speak out strongly against the war on Vietnam and so in 1967 and '68 he did. He delivered his most famous antiwar speech “Beyond Vietnam” at Manhattan’s Riverside Church exactly one year before he died. It’s hard to understand just how radical it was at the time. His closest advisors tried to talk him out of it because they felt it would dilute his civil rights work. It would alienate President Johnson who was a civil rights supporter, but also pursuing the war. And it did. He would be labeled unpatriotic for his criticism of America’s foreign policy. But he felt that ending discrimination in America and ending the massacre in Vietnam were not separate. As a man of conscience, a man of compassion, he had to speak. And he paid the price for speaking out. All the major media backed the War. He was regularly attacked in national newspapers. The New York Times wrote editorials against him. Many of his supporters turned against him. He was called a traitor and a commie.

 He was attacked for many of the same reason we peace activists who oppose the wars in Iraq, Pakistan Afghanistan, and all our military actions around the world, are attacked today and his answers to them were a lot the same as ours are.

 First he connected the war with racism and the struggle for equality. Far more black men were sent to fight and die than their white brothers, who had the financial means and connections to escape the draft. Young black men denied equal rights in our society were going off to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia. Today, in our voluntary military, there is an economic draft, where those same young black men--faced with lack of jobs and few opportunities--are forced to join the military to survive.

  King was not limited by a narrow nationalistic view--by the idea of our country, right or wrong. He thought of himself as a world citizen. His dedication was not limited to the needs of African-Americans or the cause of civil rights. He was dedicated not just to save the soul of America but to work for the betterment of all, the brotherhood of man. He felt a special need to speak out against our militaristic nature. It was impossible to preach non-violence to young angry black men until he had spoken clearly to the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world of his day”—his own country.

He spoke of the collateral damage of the war and of the suffering of the people we claimed to be liberating—not the soldiers on each side, or the military government, but of the civilians, people who had been under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades. Even for those we came to support, we poisoned their water, killed their crops, destroyed their families, their villages and often brought death. And in today’s wars waged by our country, the collateral damage continues to grow. In World War I there was one civilian killed for every 10 soldiers on both sides. Nowadays it’s just the opposite. With the technological advances in killing tools, there are at least 5 innocent civilians killed for every one soldier.

And what about the wars’ effects on our own people? Then as now, “This business of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love”.

His strongest response to his critics about his opposition to the war was economic and I agree with that today. He said “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” When we feed the homeless in the park in Columbia every Sunday with Food Not Bombs, we set up our sign. On one side is our logo, on the other, General Eisenhower’s words.

 “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

 Today the military represents 55% of our discretionary budget. The Afghan war alone costs us $2 billion a week. And the arms manufacturers and war mongers are selling weapons to both sides, getting rich off the blood of our young people. Those who will stand up and speak out fearlessly against such insanity today are needed now more than ever.

 At the end of his life, King was consumed with his dream of ending poverty. He spoke about it as early as 1964 in his Nobel Prize Lecture, but by 1968, he was speaking out strongly about the interrelatedness of racism, war and poverty. He was truly on dangerous ground. He expanded his vision from working to achieve equal rights for African Americans and peacemaking, to bringing an end to systemic poverty and seeking economic justice for all. Before, he was trying to change the way people in and out of power thought about race and war; now he was trying to change the way people in and out of power thought about power. 

On the day of his death he was in Memphis supporting the sanitation workers’ strike—for fair wages and decent working conditions. On the agenda was the Poor People’s Campaign, a plan to bring thousands of the poor of all races on another march to Washington to demand jobs and, most radical of all, not just a living wage, but a guaranteed income for all. In 1968 he understood economic exploitation and his dream was to end it. Throughout his life, King faced the three great evils of mankind—racism, war, and poverty. His dream was to overcome all three.

The night before he died, King delivered his last great speech of hope, assuring his followers that his dreams would not die. If they, like us today, would continue to pursue those dreams, he knew that someday we would get to the promised land. 

Does Our President Fear the War Complex?

Would Obama Die for His Country?

Obama won the Presidency campaigning as a peacemaker but has approved $40 billion for arms sales to other countries in his first year in the White House compared to the $34.5 billion President G.W. Bush approved in his last year in office according to the US State Department. Bush, who blustered his way into war has been replaced by Obama, a smooth salesman for the US war complex, aka the military, industrial complex or defense industry. Obama has surged the number of troops in Afghanistan; deployed planes, cruise missiles and electronic attacks against Libya; and provided increasing amounts of arms to most of the countries in the Middle East, South Asia and most any other country that wants them.

The war complex relies on war and the threat of war to create their markets. Members of Congress, with defense plants and military bases in their states and districts and war complex contributions in their pockets, put defense spending cuts off-the-table while education, health care and other quality of life programs are cut to the bone. A Commander-in Chief that goes to war, okay sales and gifts of killing tools to almost any country that wants them and takes campaign contributions from the war complex is their kind of President. According to national security analyst Lawrence Korb, the baseline defense budget has grown for 13 straight years. Between fisca
l 1998 and 2011, the budget rose from $271 billion to $580 billion This doesn’t include war costs and the Afghanistan War alone costs us roughly $2 billion per week. The U.S. share of global military spending has jumped from one-third to one-half. If big money is made killing people is anyone exempt from being killed?

A lawyer friend was a White House Fellow assigned as an intern to top officials of the CIA in the late 1970s. A badge wielding agent came to my office and questioned me about his credibility for a top secret security clearance. My friend was in a position among the spooks to hear some inside stuff. Years later after a few drinks one evening he told me what he had heard about intelligence and military officials giving ominous messages to newly sworn in Presidents when they meet their Commander in Chief and explain to him their duty to provide him personal security and intelligence about national security.

Nowadays, national security bigwigs are from the United States Intelligence Community(IC) led by the Director of National Intelligence and includes top officers in military intelligence, the CIA and Secret Service. The IC collects and produces foreign and domestic intelligence, contributes to military planning, performs espionage and provides for the President’s personal security. They gather at the White House to brief the President on matters of national security like how he can authorize a nuclear attack with the black box brief case they present him. Finally, their spokesman lowers his voice in a sinister tone and says something like:

“Mr. President you are our new Commander-Chief and you have a very dangerous job. Four of your predecessors have been assassinated and six more survived assassination attempts. We will protect you but you must listen to us about matters of national security and cooperate with us for your personal safety. This video is about the safety issue.”

The new President is shown a video of John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

I learned that war is a killer and money maker as a young soldier in basic training at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina in 1955. I enjoyed the running and calisthenics but bayonet and machine gun training made me realize what the military is all about. In bayonet training we attached our bayonets to our rifles and ran and stuck a dummy that was “the enemy”. Our trainers had experienced close up killing in Korea and they made us scream “kill, kill, kill” as loud as we could and stick the dummy as hard as we could. If we didn’t holler loud enough or stick the dummy hard enough we had to do all over again. A trainer shouted, “young soldiers this is what the Army is all about, kill or be killed!” I realized then the Army was not for me because I did not want to kill anyone and damn sure didn’t want to be killed.

Later we practiced shooting 30 and 50 caliber machine guns. When we finished the trainers shot up and wasted several boxes of ammunition. I asked my sergeant why they were wasting the expensive ammunition and he muttered, “Shut up young soldier, it’s the Army way.” Is this Obama’s way?

He has awarded 3 Medals of Honor to families of military personnel killed in
combat and said each “fallen hero…gave his life…his last full measure of devotion for our country.” Obama would be a global hero who risked his life for our country and people everywhere by saying “No” to war and the war complex.

War Steals From the Poor and Unemployed

Military spending is causing huge deficits and wasting money needed for education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and developing clean, renewable energy. 14.9 million Americans are unemployed. 50.7 million Americans did not have health insurance and 43.6 million or 14.3% lived beneath the poverty level in 2009, according to the Census Bureau and the numbers are even higher now. Expenditures for our bloated war complex are about 55% of all discretionary spending. We have spent more than a trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 and much more in bribes to government officials, and tribal chiefs and payments to corrupt private contractors. According to the Democratic Leadership Council, US military spending accounted for 44% of all money spent globally on war, weapons and the military in 2009.Our military spending is as much as all of the next 15 countries combined. The number of people killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is anywhere from 100,000 to a million or more depending on who does the estimates. Statistics on the number of civilians and military personnel killed are often distorted by military propaganda.

Glorification of the mass terrorism of war by media, politicians, weapons makers and other violence peddling war profiteers is depressing. Killing people by war and willful violence is the most demented activity of our species. War is intrinsically evil. Peacemakers like Jesus, Mother Theresa, Gandhi and Martin Luther King are real heroes rather than the war complex hyped “warriors” who “fight for our freedom” by killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan so the US can control their governments and natural resources. Metaphors like the war on poverty seem inappropriate in describing anti-poverty programs, which are diminished by the diversion of resources to make war. Lyndon Johnson took on the pervasive poverty

of the 1960 by promoting broad anti-poverty social programs like civil rights, education, Medicare and Medicaid as part of his Great Society.

Rather than advocate more social programs that provide jobs, Obama wants to tinker with middle class tax cuts and a roll back on tax breaks for the fat cats, but how much will trickle down to poor and unemployed people?

When a reporter asked Obama to discuss his views on the poverty agendas of LBJ and Dr. King, he answered, “I think the history of anti-poverty efforts is that the most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy. It’s more important than any program we could set up. It’s more important than any transfer payment we could have.” Economic growth and tax cuts that increase corporate profits will not eliminate poverty. Such praise of Reagan’s supply side economics isn’t new for Obama.

During the presidential campaign in 2008, Obama said, “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” Does Obama model his super smooth style after Reagan’s slick salesman act?

Reagan was a mediocre movie actor when he became the host of the General Electric Theater on NBC. General Electric launched his political career by sponsoring a national speaking tour for their handsome, look-um-in-the-eye, all-American guy, who promoted their conservative philosophy. He was the ideal political huckster for corporate America's unbridled greed. Reagan put a nice face on the mean-spirited politics of fear and greed, blaming welfare mothers, social programs, government regulations and the “evil empire of the Soviet Union” as causes for America's troubles. Scapegoating poor people and criticizing government programs enabled him to deliver a giant tax break for the rich, roll back health and safety regulations, and push through a gigantic military buildup for corporate defense contractors like General Electric. His racially charged attacks on affirmative action hurt racial minorities and women.

Obama’s smooth rhetoric can’t conceal his role in bailing out Wall Street, cutting deals with corporate interests to dilute the healthcare reform bill, and developing financial regulations in closed-door meetings with bankers.

Rather than praising Reagan, Obama should make Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt his role models and work to establish social programs which provide jobs for poor and working class people. LBJ can also teach Obama that endless wars won’t work. We should end tax cuts for the rich and transfer funds from war and Wall Street to social programs that put people to work and reduce poverty.

Making Money on Killers Close to Home

Cell Phones, Texting and Apps

It's all about making money. The more people talk and text, the more money the cell phone industry makes, and the more talking and texting in vehicles the more people die. 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries are caused each year by distracted drivers on cell phones. According to the National Safety Council, more than 1.6 million traffic crashes a year are caused by drivers using cell phones or texting, which is 28% of all vehicle wrecks. Meanwhile, the wireless communications industry makes out like bandits as it sells its fancy phones with a multitude of apps on countless TV commercials and actively lobbies to defeat legislation prohibiting cell phone use and texting while driving.

It's about making money with war too. Quartz, gold, lithium and copper are essential elements used in the wireless communications industry and are all found in mineral rich Afghanistan. The burgeoning industry will benefit if the US and NATO nations can control the government there.

Since I have battle fatigue from writing about war, cutting through the fog and exposing its folly, let’s take a break and look at another killer, one closer to home - the contagious, infectious, and ubiquitous cell phone syndrome. Cell phone obsession can be rude, demeaning -- and deadly.

In 2006, financial writer Jon Markman wrote about cell phone addiction while touting investments in the industry as a big money maker. “When you get in your car, you reach for it. When you're at work, you take a break to have a moment alone with it. When you get into an elevator, you fondle it. And experts say it is becoming more difficult for many people to curb their longing to hug it more tightly than most of their personal relationships. With its shiny surfaces, its sleek and satisfying touch, its mysteries and air of sophistication, the cell phone connects us to the world even as it disconnects us from people three feet away.”

Cell phones have become an escape from reality and a costly social problem for Americans like other harmful addictions. They distract from important one-on-one personal contact. Have you ever noticed parents talking on a phone at a restaurant, paying no attention to their texting children during the meal and wondered if they did the same thing at home, or people chatting on a phone in their car, ignoring their fellow passengers? A high school teacher told me her students are distracted from learning by text-messaging and they use their multiple phones apps to cheat.

I enjoy making eye contact and greeting people I casually encounter, whether or not I know them, and feel good when they respond in kind. Now-a-days most of them are so into a phone conversation or texting while walking down the sidewalk, or standing on the corner, that they are oblivious to my greeting. Is it cooler to talk or text to virtual people than be friendly to a real person?

Industrial sociologist Jim Williams says we don’t have as many pals as our parents and, "Just as more information has led to less wisdom, more acquaintances via the Internet and cell phones have produced fewer (real) friends."

But there can be even greater damage. Our law firm focuses on personal injury litigation. We investigate the causes of vehicle crashes that injure our clients and damage their vehicles. As talking and texting on cell phones increases, the number of vehicle crashes caused by talking and texting drivers increases. It is a common occurrence to see a vehicle that swerves for no apparent reason and is slow to respond to changes in the traffic flow. When you pass it you will notice its driver talking to a cell phone or looking down to text or do some apps—maybe watching a movie or YouTube video, tweeting or updating Facebook on their Blackberry or iPhone. A survey shows that 52% of 16 and 17-year-old teen drivers confess to using cell phones and 34% admit to text messaging while driving.

Pedestrians preoccupied with their phones wander out in front of cars.

Manufacturers and distributors of cell phones and related devices face no consequences when texting, talking and apping lead to accidents, injuries or death. A lawsuit can be brought against the negligent drivers or their employers (if they are on the job) but not the cell phone company which enabled their negligent behavior. Cell phone industry lobbyists work hard to prevent legislation and regulation to prohibit cell phone use and texting while driving. They push driver education as the answer and pander to the libertarian notion of saying no to any government interference with an individual’s freedom to cause wrecks and kill or injure people.

It's all about making money -- and it's deadly. Let's stop the killers close to home. Ban cell phone use while driving!

Chaos and Blowback

General McChaos is Canned;

Times Square Bomber Blowback

Faisal Shahzad pled guilty to all ten counts of charges stemming from his failed terror attempt to detonate explosives in crowded Times Square on May 1. He said, “It’s a war” and that he was avenging the deaths of innocent Muslim women and children killed by US drone attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. The guilty plea was heard in Federal District Court in New York on June 21. Shahzad was referring to the deadly drone attacks which have been doubled by President Obama over the number of attacks made by the Bush administration. The attacks were carried out by the Joint Special Operations Command which was headed by General Stanley McChrystal from April 2003 to August 2008 with the help of the CIA. Obama removed McChrystal as commander of American forces in Afghanistan on June 23 and replaced him with General David Patraeus.

Obama stood in the White House Rose Garden with Vice President Biden, General Patraeus and other top military brass and “regretfully” accepted General McChrystal’s resignation. Obama said he did so because snide and derogatory remarks from the general and his staff about senior administration officials in a Rolling Stone article were contemptuous. Among many other disparaging comments, McChrystal told a Rolling Stone reporter that he felt the new President looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” while meeting with senior military officers just after Obama was inaugurated. In the chaotic turn of events, Obama summoned McChrystal to the White House from Afghanistan where he has been commander of the increasingly unpopular war. A recent ABC / Washington Post poll revealed that people felt the war was not worth fighting by a 53 to 44 margin. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had 62% of the American people saying the country was going in the wrong direction and Obama’s approval rating at 45% with 48% disapproval.“War is bigger than any one man or woman, whether a private, a general or president,” Obama said. “As difficult as it is to lose General McChrystal, I believe it is the right decision for national security.” “I welcome debate among my team,” he said, “but I won’t tolerate division.”

McChrystal’s first controversy in the Afghanistan war was in 2004 when he tried, amid the chaos, to cover up the fact that former NFL star Pat Tillman was killed by “friendly fire”.

Obama stressed that this was a change in personnel, but not a change in policy and did not signal a shift in his overall war strategy in Afghanistan, which was designed by McChrystal and adopted by Obama. Under it, 30,000 new American troops have been arriving in recent months, but US and NATO are suffering the most casualties since the war began.

Even people who approve killing of innocent civilians by drone attacks paid for by our tax dollars should have some understanding of Shahzad’s motives for his failed act of terror which will result in his serving a mandatory sentence of life without parole. When the judge asked “You wanted to injure a lot of people?” Shahzad replied that he wanted “to injure people or kill people.” “One has to understand where I’m coming from.” He considered himself “a Muslim soldier,” and that United States had attacked Muslim lands. The judge interjected: “But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night. Did you look around to see who they were?”

Shahzad answered, “Well, the people select the government; we consider them all the same.”

Including the children?” the judge asked.

Shahzad replied, “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq…don’t see children; they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children. They kill everybody. It’s a war. And in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims: I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people. And … I'm avenging the attack. Living in the United States, Americans only care about their own people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."

Mr. Shahzad was unapologetic. “I want to plead guilty, and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times over, because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan,…and stops the drone strikes and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims, we will be attacking U.S., and I plead guilty to that.”


Shahzad also answered the judge’s questions about his background and even his family. “I had a wife and two beautiful kids.” They have returned to Pakistan to be with his parents.

US officials portray the missile strikes as attempts to kill leaders of al Qaeda. US media quote unnamed intelligence officials who claim the victims of the missile strikes are all “militants,” without any validation of who were killed.

A Pakistani newspaper reported that 687 civilians had been killed in approximately 60 drone strikes carried out since January 2008. More than 30 drone attacks have been launched since and the number of Pakistani civilians killed may be more than a 1,000 by now.


General McChaos is canned and Shahzad is going to spend his life in jail, but how many more casualties from the longest war in US history and blowback from avenging terrorists will we tolerate?

The perplexed puppet

The perplexed puppet jerks on his strings: Karzai calls US troops invaders

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a former consultant for UNOCAL oil company was installed by the US as the President of Afghanistan after our invasion and occupation of that country. Now he complains that US and NATO troops are invaders of Afghanistan and this is drawing a furious reaction from the Obama administration and the mainstream media. His outburst deserves a closer look at what led up to this furor in Afghanistan as Karzai turns on his US puppeteer.

Karzai denounced those in the Washington and the media who have criticized the corruption and incompetence of his regime with what could be a very true complaint, “They wanted to have a puppet government. They wanted a servant government.”

The Afghan parliament voted to strip Karzai of his power he had asserted to appoint the members of the country’s election commission, which will be in charge of parliamentary elections in the fall. The parliament’s action was pressured by the US ambassador.

Karzai said, “In this situation there is a thin curtain between invasion and cooperation‑assistance.” He predicted that if the people of Afghanistan thought that the Afghan government were mercenaries for the Western powers, the Taliban‑led insurgency “could become a national resistance.” Karzai was quoted as saying “I might join the Taliban”.

What Karzai warns of as a possible outcome for the US‑led war in Afghanistan has already largely come to pass, as a report in Sunday’s New York Times makes clear. NY Times correspondent Richard A. Oppel, Jr., in a front‑page article from Marja, Afghanistan, wrote that after their much publicized offensive that had been described as successful, the US marines have no control in the region outside their own bases. Oppel also said the Taliban is resurgent, the collaborators with the US occupation are isolated and targeted for retaliation, and that much of the US‑funded reconstruction work has been shut down.

Oppel concluded: “In Marja, the Taliban are hardly a distinct militant group, and the Marines have collided with a Taliban identity so dominant that the movement appears more akin to the only political organization... with an influence that touches everyone. Even the Marines admit to being somewhat flummoxed.”

“We’ve got to re‑evaluate our definition of the word ‘enemy,’” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of the Marine expeditionary brigade in Helmand Province, told the Times. “Most people here identify themselves as Taliban.”

Is Karzai revealing the underlying reason for the nine year old US war in Afghanistan, that we were told was in a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Are we fighting to prop up a puppet regime that will serve US corporate interests in Central Asia—one of the largest suppliers of oil and gas to the world market.

Karzai, the amiable former business consultant and CIA "asset", was installed by Washington as Afghanistan's president. Remember when he was the honored guest at President Bush’s State of the Union message to Congress, smiling and waving from the balcony in his regal Afghani robe? As the U.S. gets bogged down in a quagmire in Afghanistan, are we scape-goating the puppet for our problems?

Is the underlying reason for all the railing and blaming of Karzai in actuality a refrain of "Bad puppet! Bad puppet!"

The U.S. Congressional Research service just revealed it costs a staggering $1.3 million per annum to keep an American soldier in Afghanistan. This huge expense can't go on forever.

When the head of a government kept in place by US arms and dollars issues a public rebuke to his master it requires a closer look at why. Could it be the increasing animosity of the Afghan people to the occupation, with thousands of innocent people being killed by American bombs, rockets, commando raids and massacres, along with despair of Karzai, who feels increasingly marginalized as the nominal head of Afghanistan. Also Karzai has an agenda different from the US. Just like the policy of the U.S., Pakistan, the Taliban, as well as Karzai and every other interest involved, all realize that sometime, perhaps sooner than later, the US will have to leave-- due to the costs in lives and money and its effect on US public opinion.

Karzai’s speech to election officials was just four days after the visit by Obama who had a confrontational meeting with Karzai. Published reports said that Obama berated Karzai over the corruption in his regime and the vote‑rigging in last year’s presidential election. Perhaps Karzai’s overtures to Iran and China were also raised.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called Karzai’s comments “troubling” and “cause for real and genuine concern.” Karzai’s remarks were also called “preposterous” by a State Department official.

The rebuke from our puppet has the US media in a dither. A New York Daily News editorial was headlined “Cuckoo Karzai.” Have 1,000 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans died to keep a madman in power?

The New York Times, termed Karzai’s criticism “delusional” and warned that his statement could have political repercussions in the United States, because “it undermines the fragile public support for President Obama’s strategy” of pouring 30,000 more US troops into the Afghanistan war.

“Mr. Karzai is encouraging those who want the United States out of Afghanistan,” the editorial concluded. “He risks boiling down a more complicated policy debate to the notion that American lives are being sacrificed simply to keep him in power. It’s hard to think of a better way to doom Afghanistan’s future, as well as his own.” This has a sinister sound because almost 50 years ago another US puppet had a fatal problem with the US in 1963 when President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam was overthrown and murdered in a US‑backed military coup that set the stage for even deeper US military intervention in Southeast Asia. Diem faced similar criticism for corruption, incompetence and vote‑rigging.

Should Karzai as a successor US puppet to Diem, be concerned about Diem's fate since he also jerked on the strings of his US puppeteer?