I was one of the cannon fodder President Johnson sent to Vietnam in 1966 in the buildup. When I arrived in Vietnam we had a hundred thousand troops there. When I left a year later, we had about five times that number. Officially we had about 400,000, but I kept strength figures and know the American people had been lied to by the military and our government. It is likely that even most Members of Congress didn't know the truth about this, as thousands of troops were identified officially as being stationed outside of Vietnam.
The CIA has people working full time to fool the American people, to get them on board for the adventures of the National Security State in the name of corporate greed at any cost. Philip Agee, a former CIA agent, told me about it in a discussion I had with him decades ago, and he exposed it in his wonderful book Inside the Company. They feed misinformation to the American people through journalists in the corporate media. Former CIA Director William Colby famously said "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
Most people working in the mass media have no idea they are participating in a massive propaganda network, passing on lies they believe to be the truth. Since most are ignorant, the system works even better through their sincere disseminations, the most sophisticated propaganda system ever devised.
And so we hear in a corporate media drumbeat that more troops must be sent to Afghanistan, just as we were once blasted with a similar echo that more troops must be sent to Vietnam. There is no concern by representatives of the National Security State for the many deaths which will ensue.
The idea is to keep sending cannon fodder to Afghanistan with the hope that at some point, the Pashtun will surrender. We tried that when the "Taliban" of the day were called "Viet Cong" by our government and it didn't work. We are escalating again, 20,000 more troops, to face over 40 million Pashtun who hate foreign occupation and are sworn to rid themselves of it, having defeated superpowers before --Jack
