With all the chatter and blather in the Blogosphere about how Dick Cheney is personally going to start WWIII in Iran, it's funny that everyone seems to have forgotten the other country where the US military pulled a butch- Afghanistan. In point of fact the list of countries and individuals who had their asses put in a sling in Afghanistan is long and includes Alexander the Great, Tamerlane the Magnificent, Genghis Khan, the British (twice), the Soviet Union, and now of course the United States. It seems as though when your empire is on its last legs and you can't think of any better way to self-destruct, you invade Afghanistan.

The Afghanis are amazing fighters and they know the business of guerrilla warfare inside out. They are said to actually enjoy being invaded. It's like a big game to them. They know that they have never been beaten, and they know that they never will be. For example, after invading Kabul in 1839 and setting up an unpopular puppet shah, the British Army set off on an expedition to Jalalabad. Of more than 16,000 troops only one Englishman made it to Jalalabad; the rest were all killed in guerrilla raids by Afghanis. It has always been my considered opinion they left him alive on purpose to tell the tale. 

An excellent way of understanding the Afghani culture of guerrilla warfare is to describe their national pastime. It is called Buzkashi and makes the NFL look like a game for nellies. First you shoot a goat. It is considered unsporting to shoot this goat from a distance of less than, oh, about a thousand meters or so. Of course if you can shoot a goat from a distance of a thousand meters you can definitely kill an American GI from a similar distance. He makes a much bigger target. The first round of the game being over they cut the goats' head off and engage in the most violent form of polo you could ever imagine. Some games go on for days until the goats' carcass consists of a few shreds of meat and some of the contestants are dead. I also have it on very good authority that in some of the more remote areas of Afghanistan Buzkashi is played with a man's corpse and not a goats'

Now after reading the above you have probably figured out that getting involved with these people in any way shape or form is probably not the greatest of ideas. The Soviet Union had over 100,000 troops in the place and didn't control a single province. But then when you are dealing with brilliant geniuses like the Neocons and Dick Cheney, not to mention the loony in chief George W Bush, who probably couldn't even find Afghanistan on a map - why am I stopping at Afghanistan, he probably could not find America on a map either - they are such morons they don't know any better. Their "Nation Building" is such a failure that Afghanistan is now the world's leading producer of raw opium. Notice how you never even hear reports on what is going on in Afghanistan anymore? That's how bad it is. Their puppet, Hamid Karzai, a failed restaurateur,  is such a joke in the country at large that one of the leading warlords calls him continuously in his office to taunt him. "Hey, Hamid, you got caller ID? Since you know where I am why don't you come and arrest me? Afraid to leave Kabul?"

I have a piece of advice for Dick Cheney - If this cretin actually attacks Iran which I doubt - I don't think the generals will let him - he will have this huge mess on his left flank called Iraq, and he will have this huge mess on his right flank called Afghanistan. It should work out very well - for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Cheney should heed the dying words of Napoleon, "Study History, for it is the only true philosophy"

There are three individuals in America who seem not to understand that it is all over for them. One is George W. Bush, the other is Dick Cheney and the third is Britney Spears.

Than Britney Spears I can think of no better figure to symbolize the decline and fall of American culture. This talentless, drug-addled girl. possessed of the obligatory bleached blonde hair and a sort of blank. commonplace prettiness, stumbling through a few dance steps in a vulgar and unbecoming costume, losing custody of her children, and going right straight down to the bottom of the barrel shows how far we have really fallen.

Once upon a time the most fascinating, unique women in the world ruled American entertainment. They might have had personal problems, sure - but who cared? The incandescence of Marilyn Monroe, the beauty and grace of Rita Hayworth, the face of Greta Garbo, of which a famous wag once said that whatever it was that men saw in other women when they had been drinking they saw in Garbo when they were dead sober. These women had talent that was genuine and great.

As far as Bush and Cheney go they float about in their little bubble in the White House, living in a world of sick little dreams. They do not realize that it is over, all over for them. They sit at their desks babbling about invading Syria, attacking Iraq, remaking the entire Middle East into some weird little group of villayets that the Zionists can control and exploit. They remind me of Hitler in the last days of WWII talking about moving certain groups of armor up in the line on the Eastern Front. It seemed to have escaped Hitler that these Panzer corps had long since ceased to exist. I don't think these fools could launch a successful invasion of Bayonne, New Jersey. They very definitely could not attack Iran all by themselves, although they have so little support this is what it might come down to. The Generals do not support them, the people do not support them, and the money men do not support them. Of course this might be a splendid way to get rid of them. Issue them each an M-16 and a parachute and shove them out of a B-52 over Iran. Mission Accomplished!

Once upon a time in America - I know It seems so hard to believe now- we actually had real men running things. I am thinking of Ulysses S Grant. If you have never read "The Personal Memoirs Of US Grant" by all means do so, keeping in mind that the man was dying of cancer of the throat the entire time he was writing it and was taking morphine constantly. From the point of view of literature it is one of the greatest books ever written. The day after he finished the book he died. His last words were "Let Us Have Peace".

The entire book is filled with deathless phrases like that, and example after example of Grant's moral courage. "No terms, except for immediate and unconditional surrender will be offered or accepted" "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer" The scene where William Tecumseh Sherman found Grant smoking a cigar under a tree after the first day of the battle of Shiloh (a/k/a Pittsburgh Landing) which was quite frankly a fiasco for the Union forces is priceless. Sherman said  "Well, Grant, we've had the devil's own day, haven't we?" Without removing the cigar from his mouth Grant responded, "Yep. Lick 'em tomorrow though" Which he did.

Of course one does feel slightly sorry for Bush And Cheney. As one of my Classical History professors used to say no one dressed in sackcloth and ashes ever went into the Roman Emperor's palace circa 450AD and said, "It's all over buddy - the Roman Empire is finished". Bush - Cheney are too stupid to realize what has just happened to them. Their currency is worthless, their Army is a broken reed, they rolled the dice and they lost. In the immortal words of Edward Gibbon, author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" "This, then was the triumph of Barbarism and Christianity"

Remember all those earnest young Republicans sent to Iraq via the Heritage Foundation with their blonde hair and their blonde teeth who were supposedly going to bring civilization to this blighted land? I also remember a young GI pointing to a group of Iraqi children playing in raw sewage and stating in a voice quivering in indignation that that was why he was in Iraq, so that his son would never have to play in raw sewage. His logic totally escaped me, but being of a cynical turn of mind I thought to myself, "Is that what you think this war is about, you fool? Sewage?" 

Well, four years have gone by, in which the Bechtel Group, a San Fransisco firm with strong ties to the Bush Administration has been awarded contracts of $680 million and $ 1.8 billion to fix the Iraqi infrastructure including power plants, water purification stations, schools, and airports. Most of the work they have done is so shoddy that it has had to be done over again, and the horrendous job that they did on water purification plants and sewage treatment facilities is shown up by the fact that a Cholera epidemic has broken out in the country. 

Cholera, or Cholera Morbus, is a disease native to the river Ganges, in India. It originally spread , like most epidemics, by trade routes and various wars, to Russia, then to Western Europe, and then from there to North America. Between 1816 to 1970, millions perished from this disease, which spreads through drinking water contaminated by the raw waste of the infected. One can imagine the absolute terror that a report of cholera would cause back before we had modern medicine to treat this horrible disease. Without treatment, which consists of oral rehydration with water mixed with sugar and salt and doses of various antibiotics, 50% of all people who came down with the disease would be dead within a day. They would literally stool themselves to death. Of course, now in the modern world we have at least theoretically the flushing toilet, the sewage treatment plant, and the water filtration facility. Most people have never even heard of Cholera.

However, things are about to change. The Cholera epidemic in Iraq has so far claimed 13 victims, and there have been 2,277 cases. Since drinking water contaminated with raw sewage is such a problem in Iraq and Cholera is spread through a vicious cycle of drinking water being contaminated with waste from Cholera victims, one can only expect the epidemic to rage on and to claim many victims.

I feel this epidemic is a perfect metaphor for the Bush-Cheney fiasco in Iraq. Firstly, it has to do with waste products of the body, which is what Bush and Cheney really are. Secondly, it shows how completely incompetent they are, that a disease that terrified the Paris poor in 1848 has somehow become viable again in a territory which was under their purview. And again, it shows the corrupt crony capitalism which has become the norm under their, shall we call it reign? How can Bechtel get away with pocketing billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money and then doing nothing in return because "the security was bad"? Have their been wars in history I missed reading about where the security was good?

We need to get rid of all these people. I don't just mean Bush-Cheney, although that would be a start. We need to get rid of all of them. We need to have people's democracy, direct democracy, so that there will be no more wars, no more corruption, no more crazy government regulations, no more wiretapping of private conversations. The American people have sat around passively long enough. Remember, we have the power-they do not. They have just brainwashed us into thinking otherwise. But their day is drawing to a close.