One has to wonder about the venerable opium poppy plant itself: It probably can grow in places where other plants won’t.

All I know is if any lush green areas turn up there anywhere, on google earth, I think we can deduce it is their cash export crop. useful for barter and trade for other foods grown elsewhere.

Its like Le Grec anciens, little else grew there except olives and grapes, but they traded for everything else, on the Mediterranean sea lanes. And became the wealthiest subdivision of loosely allied or warring clans and tribes, I guess that’s what the Illiad is about; them trying to become a confederation and failing to do so.

I hate to go all environmental, but the thing that turned that broad area, from Morrocco to Pakistan, from semi-arid to arid was the sheep and goats, who eat not only the grass, but the roots and seeds as well. (everything but the stones who cry out “there’s one here!”.

Its hard to imagine these off-the-books, ‘special forces’-foreign service, bureaucrat ‘volunteers’ (from Americorps, as I alluded to earlier) involved in some kind of realistic, re- or mis- application of a plan that tells the Afghanis to drop their way of life (the goats and trad. trade), and arbitrarily adopt the sort of ‘”agrarian reform” the communists of old claimed to be implementing, but never quite succeeded in, in places far more productive else where. And ended up just confiscating land and property from those engaging in Catholicism, or teaching, or some other form of western bourgeois colonial activity or mentality, in southeast Asia in “the good old days”.

And just what forms of “agrarian” agriculture is likely to succeed in a place as harsh as Afghanistan. And one wonders, as well, what is it about Afghanistan that gets folks like Britain or Russia for example, so interested in that local in the first place? It certainly isn’t the jewel in any crown, as India might have been, and probably was.

And that probably brings us back to opium, and its, (as mentioned by Armageddon Rex in#5) its viability as a item of trade or barter. Mix in some of Obamas offshoot americorps and you’ve got corruption; and I’m sure some of those like the folks in Oakland are just itching for some (more) payback for perceived
‘social injustice’ that they see as being in default and payments for such, need to be resumed.

I don’t trust anything anymore and I would back this up by citing the subjective opinion that, moslems would probably laugh at the prospect of nuclear devastation. It explains why Islam thrives in bleak desolate area’s (Allah wills it (or willed) it), and why they feel no compunction on imposing similar conditions on the rest of anywhere’s in their sights. One must pony up, or ante up, the ‘good faith’ down payment (the austere, spartan existence of …), to demonstrate that one perceives fully the way Islam operates. Learn the lesson of the goat.

Opium, more specifically morphine, comes in handy when dealing with battlefield injuries, which makes all this so self fulfilling, dammit. That’s why I was ready to accept the idea of disengagement with Iraq, (because we got them on their feet this quickly (quicker even than, oh, deutschland, Nippon, South
Korea, as opposed to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos where we weren’t able to)), and Afghanistan, because its not so nation-ready; not yet, not for a good long Indiana Jones “look at these quaint, simple, primitive superstitious peoples!!” time. (see Illiad, and Saul)

Obamas reneged on the most supreme article of his platform, that there is no ‘war on terror’ and those who want their head back in its sand bought it hook, line and sinker. Along w/ Libertarians and ‘independents’, even some republicans, who got cold feet and squishy, because the going seemed to get ruff. And so they bought into the idea that a war could be fought non-chaotically, from the infusion of absurd propagandic criticism’s alone. (see press reports Israel, circa Aug 9, 2006 up to the Litani River). They thought he would draw down the involvement of troops far away. And If there is any real politic in that, it would be because maybe we need our troops in defense of our borders here, against encroachment(s) onto our home turf. Patton did that.

Putting aside Sandler/Soros master plans for the moment, there can be only one explanation for this, as I see it: that he sees himself as Mahdi, and when disastre and corruption erupt onto the pages of newscript, and ‘journalists’ “question all this”, in their uberconscience, reviving the old ‘vietnam template’; they will explain it all away, saying it was all Bush administration idea anyway, and colonisation and whatnot, (and Afghanistan didn’t attack us on 9/11, or was that Iraq? Oh, whatever…) when teleprompter man had a differnet objective all along.

Nukes? they are just the fast food variety of what can be accomplished by the more useful and merciful, and edible sheep and goats, in just fourteen centuries.