8 Votes
Dave Lindorff: Country Joe, Kenny Rogers, and Obama
Posted by
expathos 301 days ago
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http://blog.buzzflash.com —
Country Joe McDonald said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that started out because the U.S. didn't want the Commies to win a battle in the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious -- we had no business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in" surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found itself mired in a brutal war of occupation, and the U.S. had begun, back in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the Russians, not because Afghanistan -- a country even more remote and meaningless in terms of U.S. interests or security than Vietnam -- had any importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in the waning days of the Cold War. read more
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