How we got in the mess

I’ve thought long and hard about the wisdom of writing this about our former president’s transgressions, the man who single-handedly pushed our country got us into the mess we’re trying to claw our way out of today.

They say that when America sneezes, Europe catches cold. It’s true.

As a Republican candidate for congressional office in the last election, its conventional wisdom that I’m supposed to fall in line with my fellow Republicans… like my Republican opposition, Phil Gingrey. That’s not my temperament. Speaking the truth is.

At the turn of the century, my wife and I were celebrating New Year’s Eve in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was packed; we felt like sardines. I can clearly remember telling my wife that the 21st century would be America’s century and we would have unbelievable prosperity. Boy, was I wrong.

Why? Because after 9/11, our president by a Supreme Court ruling, made a fateful decision… to not just retaliate against the attacks on us, but also to reorder the Middle East including parts of Africa.

That fateful decision, egged on by his advisers (who used 9/11 as the excuse to completely reorder the Middle East) was to use brute force to attack al-Qaeda, rather than special operations forces such as SEAL Teams to go after bin Laden. Bush used brawn, rather than brains. In doing so, it cost of lives of thousands of our soldiers, maimed tens of thousands more and turned the Muslim world against us, or more accurately our government.

President Obama is using (slightly) more intelligence by attacking al-Qaeda with drones, but it’s a failed policy. Why? Because this type of thought process and subsequent policy started with Hiram Maxim’s invention in 1884. Read this.

It’s a shame that President Bush took the path of brute force and nation destabilization. I believe that the terrorism problem would have been mostly behind us by now if he would have used intelligence rather than massive military force.

If you don’t believe it, watch this speech by Four Star General, Wesley Clark –

And you know what that got us. Two undeclared wars funded with borrowed money while tax rates dropped, huge numbers of innocent people killed, many thousands of our brave soldiers killed and maimed and the ongoing fueling and supply of weapons to our multiplying enemies, mostly al-Qaeda related.

We finally left Iraq, now in a simmering civil war; in the last week, about 50 Iraqis died in a series of bombings.

We are currently doing our best to get out from under Afghanistan, a failed state that will fall again to the Taliban in the same way that it fell when the Russians left. The Afghan government has its bags packed, ready to go with suitcases stuffed with cash. Our cash.

One of al-Qaeda’s goals was to bankrupt us; if we continue our foreign policy of massive overspending and overreach, it may. We spend money on these wars like water! The Taliban spends next to nothing, only using profits from poppy fields that our soldiers are ordered not to destroy. Those huge profits finally come from the world’s biggest market for illegal drugs, the United States. So in a roundabout way, we’re paying for our enemies to kill our children. Sad, but true.

Though our unbelievably bad, and naive foreign policy the carnage of the Middle East is now spreading south in Africa. North and South Mali are in an escalating war; Nigeria will be probably be sucked in because of their close ties to France (currently fighting in Mali to boost the unpopular French president, François Hollande) and the wars where we are involved will spread. All these costs huge amounts of money.

As Niger and Benin are between the two, it’s not clear which of those countries will get involved. But they will, or at least one. Which one probably depends on their oil and natural gas deposits. The war cancer is now spreading through Africa. All you have to do is to overlay a map of natural gas and oil pipelines over Africa to easily predict where the next war will likely erupt. But they usually only spread to countries that have oil.

Editor’s note. On January 23, there was a news report than Islamists killed 23 people in the northern Nigerian town of Damboa.

Editors note: This LA Times story, dated February 23, 2013 reports that we’ve sent 100 soldiers to Niger to setup a drone base. I have no doubt that that number will increase. It’s called getting your foot in the door. I wonder how much American taxpayer’s money was spent on “gifts” to facilitate our soldiers being allowed in to Niger (and wherever else) so they can setup a drone base?

I used to wonder why we hadn’t intervened before in the roughly one quarter of African countries currently at war, especially to depose Africa’s most despotic dictator, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. I reached the conclusion – no oil.

The only exceptions are to stop or hinder China from continuing to develop infrastructure in Africa, and procure African natural resources for their booming manufacturing needs.

In a nutshell, we have to borrow 40 cents of every dollar that our government spends. That’s over $40,000 a second. That’s what will destroy us. Forget al-Qaeda. We’ll do it to ourselves.

I listen to a several daily business reports, one by the BBC. They are now talking about triple dip recessions in Europe; that the cornerstones of the fragile European nations, are faltering and unemployment high. Even Great Britain, a minor reserve currency player is borrowing money at the rate of $9,300 a second or about $2,900 per U.K citizen per year. We’re currently borrowing at about $5,800 per U.S. citizen, per year to make ends meet as well!

Europe is approaching its edge. In Spain, for example, 25% of the workforce is unemployed. In Greece, it’s 25% as well. Even worse, 55% of people in Spain under 25 years old are unemployed! You rarely hear about Greece anymore.

In this country, all many people care about is who is going to win The Bachelor, or some other reality show, what’s the latest celebrity gossip about Kim Kardashian or some other trivia. Nero fiddled while Rome burned.