HELLO COLOMBIA!

Will the Obama war machine request Australian or the newly militant NATO assistance for the beefed up war in Columbia? Far-fetched? So probably not.

Stephen C Webster for AFP, via The Raw Story reports:

Some American troops will soon find themselves stationed at military bases scattered across the South American nation of Colombia with a mission to use advanced Predator drone technology to aid in fighting the drug trade and to combat terrorism, according to published reports Saturday.

But Colombia’s neighbors certainly do not see it that way.

In Venezuela, officials bristled. President Hugo Chavez warned, “the winds of war [are] beginning to blow.”

A similar report was carried by The Wall Street Journal.

Happy days are here again. There is murder in the air. The flying lawn movers, the drones, will be killing the “bad ones”, those pretending to human beings. The cowboys are coming to town, or going bush – but I thought he was past tense. Robert Gates is the portal between administrations. Timid, or is it, bold Obama seems unable to take control of anything, or else we might conclude that the power has ceased to lie with the people.

The military-industrial complex never seems to run out of money. When will they stop squandering money on murder? The poor, misguided people yelling in the town halls are described as lunatics, but what of the people who deal in death and dollars? A psychiatric assessment is the least that should be required.

There is nowhere safe on earth from the licence to kill, but does killing work, or is it simply a money scam bereft of morality or decency?

Drug wars and social chaos, as in Somalia, seem to only get worse with outside intervention that consists of picking winners and arming one side or other. Colombia might look small on a mercator projected map, but it is not small country, and the insurgency is not going to go away anytime soon which might suggest the priority should be on reconciliation. The economics of the drug trade could be looked at, for a change, by looking at the demand side to turn off the flow of money that fuels the competition for its control that has a corrosive effect on the Mexican State, for example. The drug trade creates violence, and violence is attempted and it seems inevitably unsuccessfully to suppress it.

The drug economy should not be used to obscure the other issues of social justice and structural inequality that may be reasons for the long lasting insurgency in Colombia beyond the issues of geography. There is, for example, a history of American intervention, related to the construction of the Panama Canal and the division of the country.

As in Afghanistan, there are issues related to the use of drones. Obama might well have judged that he could not challenge the military-industrial complex and the Pentagon establishment but he acceded to the use of drones. They are the method of assassination of counter-insurgency theory in which the attempt is made to take out the leadership of the guerrillas. Secondly, as illustrated in Afghanistan, they kill other people (and animals) indiscriminately, for which the American method seems to be to offer money for the innocent, a payment that implies criminal negligence. Thirdly, they are the development of the electronic battlefield, in which the casualties will in the ultimate the lesser nonhuman peoples. As the descendants of the dooddle bombs they are a method of terrorizing populations.

As we know the American Imperium, and its satraps, are beyond the reach of international law.

ELSEWHERE:

Richard Reynolds in Buenos Aires for ABC News reported the news in terms of an agreement on US bases in Colombia, which extends the number of US Bases around the world. Seven bases are a substantial foothold. There is no reported exit strategy.

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