It’s time to think about the likely future of poor Afghanistan. It isn’t terribly bright, but we have to, so the sooner, the better.
There are probably still a few neocons dreaming of a happy puppet state emerging from the shambles. The “grand strategy” was laid out by PNAC (Project for a New American Century) in 2000, calling for the US to maintain its unrivaled superpower status. This required a “new Pearl Harbor” to justify launching preemptive wars against suspect nations (after Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Iran and Yemen).
This Pearl Harbor II just happened to come along a year later, prompting Bush II to coin “the Axis of evil” to include Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and “Beyond the Axis of Evil” to include Cuba, Libya, and Syria. The plan was to bring all these countries under US hegemony by installing western-friendly regimes under a patina of electoral democracy.
US military ‘successes’
The attempted coup in Venezuela looks like it might be the brainchild of Zalmay Khalilzad, now 
Suddenly President Trump’s no longer the fool, the dupe of his generals. His latest, historic tweets are bombshells. “Getting out of Syria was no surprise. I’ve been campaigning on it for years, and six months ago, when I very publicly wanted to do it, I agreed to stay longer. Russia, Iran, and Syria & others are the local enemy of ISIS” and the US was “doing there [sic] work.”
In “How a just peace in Palestine-Israel can save our planet”,* Beit Zatoun director Robert Massoud stressed that the UN’s failure to deal with its first major crisis, the establishment of Jewish and Arab states in Palestine, seriously compromised it as a forum for international relations and world peace. Seventy years later, the UN is still impotent in the face of imperialism, and the Palestine issue is still, literally, burning. Among its atrocities, Israel uses white phosphorus--WP, know affectionately by WWII soldiers as Willie Pete--against Palestinians. Israel is not alone, as (US-made) WP is used by Saudi Arabia in its bombing in Yemen, and somebody is using it in Syria and it ain't Assad.
