Permanent military bases.

Just like Iraq.

The ol' ring around Russia and America with its jackboot firmly on vital oil and gas supplies.

Additionally, we are there to guarantee the flow of money from opium.

From the preface to Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina by Peter Dale Scott:

--

This book explores ongoing causal patterns that have helped shape U.S. foreign policy, sometimes at a deeper level than was recognized even by bureaucrats in high places. Under pressure from interested outsiders, decisions were made by the United States, after World War II in Burma and again in Laos in 1959-1965, to back armies and governments that were supporting themselves through the drug traffic. This has led to a linked succession of wars, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, which have suited the purposes of international oil corporations and U.S. drug proxy allies, far more than those of either the U.S. government or its people. Those decisions were also major causes for the dramatic increase in drug trafficking over the last half century.

Today drug networks are important factors in the politics of every continent. The United States returns repeatedly to the posture of fighting wars in areas of petroleum reserves with the aid of drug-trafficking allies (or what I call drug proxies) with which it has a penchant to become involved. Surprisingly, this is true even in Colombia, where we are nominally fighting a war on drugs; yet the chief drug-trafficking faction, the paramilitaries, are allies of our allies, the Colombian army. Worse, they are the descendants of yet another clever CIA notion -- to train terrorists to fight the left -- which has once again come back to haunt us.

This is the situation that has recently engaged the United States in Afghanistan, a country through which until 1998 a U.S. oil company, UNOCAL, hoped to build oil and gas pipelines. The drug-trafficking network of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a former CIA ally operating out of caves designed and paid for by the CIA, has just been defeated with the help of another drug proxy, the Afghan Northern Alliance. In the pursuit of bin Laden, the United States defeated his allies the Taliban (which in 2000 had enforced a total ban on opium cultivation in its area), with the aid of the Northern Alliance (which in the same period had overseen a trebling of opium cultivation in its area).

http://tinyurl.com/y69l5m

This has nothing to do with "democracy" or "terrorism" or any of the other phony smokescreens.

It's all about the huge sums of money made by oil companies and war profiteers.

They'll gladly continue to sacrifice your kids for their bottom line.

Peter Schiff on Fox Business about Warren Buffett and the Economy [Video]

http://tinyurl.com/nd7gea

Gee, what a surprise.

The only difference between pubs and dems in the lying department is how they do it.

Pubs use tried and true propaganda techniques that appeal to their gun-toting, Bible-believing, anti-big guv'ment followers.

Dems, on the other hand, tell you that they are for changing the status quo, articulate their plans for doing so and then proceed to undercut the possibility of any real change -- or they simply break the lofty promises that got them elected.

In the final analysis, when in power, both parties pursue the same corporate-military agenda.

We're still in Iraq.

We're still in Afghanistan.

Gitmo is open.

We still have no healthcare.

We still have no jobs.

There is no reform of banking and Wall Street.

And, according to this piece from the New York Times, we're still practicing "extraordinary renditions":

-

Renditions May Continue Under Interrogation Unit

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/politics/25interrogate.html

The torture never stops, as Frank Zappa once sang.

Or the lies.

Dude,

You do well to quote Walter Map, who argues from a moral/ethical basis. I don't disagree with his sentiments; rather, my focus is solely on cold, hard reality. And the reality is that this has already been legally decided. Given that fact, anyone's finer sentiments, no matter how noble or correct, are irrelevant, because this is America. Americans love guns. The SC has ruled that people have a right to bear arms. Some states apparently further allow unrestricted open carry. As such, all of the hand wringing in the world won't change anything, as I previously posted.