Exporing Failed Military Adventures: Who's Next?

The United Nations reports that Afghan Poppy Growing Reaches Record Level. It's nice to know that the Bush Administration made Afghanistan safe for heroin production. A U.N. official is quoted as saying that "the fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is becoming a reality." The officially-recognized, U.S.-backed Afghan government effectively only rules the immediate area around the capitol--President Hamid Karzai could just as well be addressed as Mayor Karzai.

Afghanistan's Taliban banned production of heroin; unlike the U.S. Army, the ban was effectively enforced (the Taliban in 2001 dropped its production by 95%). After the U.S. military came in, production soared again. Today eighty-seven percent of the world's opium production now comes from the Afghan countryside according the U.N. The U.S. Department of Justice calls heroin a significant drug threat. In 1998, the national Drug Abuse Warning Network found that coroners implicated heroin in 4,300 deaths. I don't have access to current information and the sources of American heroin, but the numbers suggest that the Taliban's crackdown on Afghan poppy production might have saved more American lives than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. I don't mean to minimize the atrocity and horror of those attacks but instead to put the current rise in drug production and trafficking in perspective: a country under U.S. occupation is producing enough drugs to kill thousands of Americans every year. This is also an issue of homeland security.

Despite the news from Afghanistan and the still-missing iraqi weapons of mass destruction, President Bush and his hawks are scoping out the next target of U.S. military aggression. In the New York Times, Bush Confronts New Challenge on Issue of Iran

In an eerie repetition of the prelude to the iraq war, hawks in the administration and Congress are trumpeting ominous disclosures about Iran's nuclear capacities to make the case that Iran is a threat that must be confronted, either by economic sanctions, military action, or "regime change."