Col Oleg

I'm just finishing the fist book in the Chalmers Johnson trilogy that you sent, and it is eye-opening for sure. Particularly considering my current position. I just now came back from a get-together with NATO and met COL Oleg, a Ukrainian officer who is out here doing combat training with the Iraqis. So I joked with him that I hope these guys don't turn on him and use his training against him (or me for that matter)... and he gives this look like (brother, you have NO IDEA) and then starts telling his story of how, as a Second Lt. in the Soviet army he was sent to fight in Afghanistan in 84? at the head of a battalion of soldiers against basically the (US funded) Afghani mujahadeen (Bin Laden). He couldn't even find the words in English to explain it. That basically his men were all but completely wiped out and then the Soviet Union collapses and fast-forward 20 years and he finds himself back in Afghanistan, this time on a NATO mission training some of the very same guys that he had been killing and who had slaughtered his men 20 years earlier - a complete mind-fuck. He was talking about the cycles of history and that was a double cycle - like how we were allies in WWII with Russia, then the cold war and now what the fuck are we all doing here at a party in Iraq? and then we extended that to the US - Iraqi situation which is a triple cycle where the US funds Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war (both sides in fact) - and you can Google an image of Donald Rumsfield shaking hands with Saddam back in those days, then we go to war with the guy, and now here we are funding and training these same people again. Total mind fuck. In the end we all agreed that in the future we should leave all this fighting to our politicians while the human beings that these assholes are supposed to represent are left alone to hang out together and drink beer and be friends.