"drug war" in colombia. interview with retired u.s. sergeant

CFnwside · Jul 31, 2002

http://www.left-turn.org/feature/archive/interviews/goff.html

spejic · Jul 31, 2002

That was awesome. This guy sees it.

CrewDust · Jul 31, 2002

My view on our aid to Columbia is that we maintain a balance of poer. Without our aid FARC would overrun the Columbia no doubt about it. It would be very bloody. Death everywhere. But the right wing paramilitaries would survive of course and the whole thing would just start all over again.

There is one other possiblity, Farc could fall apart right after victory just like in Afganistan.

bmurphyfl · Aug 1, 2002

Stan Goff said

Immediate investment in Colombia, while substantial, cannot justify the deep level of military intervention to which the US oligarchy has committed. There are geopolitical dynamics that place Colombia in the center of a storm, and that storm is the beginning of a collapse of US imperialism. I don't want to sound like Cassandra, at least not to give the impression that this collapse will be sudden and that it will appear apocalyptically in the very immediate future, though I think it's nearer than people realize. We have to put time into perspective here, and realize that a decade in an historical process is a mere instant. There was a profits crisis that impacted US capital as early as 1970, and the response that salvaged US hegemony, while complex, involved the abandonment of fixed currency exchange rates and the gold standard. It involved a strategic-monetary alliance with some of the Gulf oil states, and it involved a restructured system of imperial enforcement that traded a preponderance of gunboat diplomacy and covert operations for compliant technical 'democracies' directed in their actions through debt peonage. We call it neoliberalism now. It was essentially a successful attempt to wiggle free from the inevitable consequences of global capitalism, and now that inevitability has caught up with it. One can stay on the earth and defy the law of gravity, but eventually the law of gravity will win out. A society can be based on private property and profit and defy the tendency of the rate of profit to fall for some time, defy the relation between rates of profit and the organic composition of capital, but eventually those laws will win out. Without going into details, which are too numerous to count, we can look at the multiplication of crises for imperialism broadly, and we see that resistance to neoliberalism, which has been a catastrophe for the world's masses, is increasing, even as the imperial ruling class fights ever more violently to maintain control.
Click to expand...

This thing reads like a bad movie script. It sounds like this guy has been sitting in the jungle for the last 30 years with only copies of Webster's Dictionary and Naomi Klein's No Logo.

I think he is saying that we are really there to protect the pipelines but he needs an editor who will get him to focus. He needs to learn about using an "economy of words" before anyone will listen to him.

Murf