Israel has 150 nuclear weapons: Former U.S. president

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, according to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He made the statement while arguing that the U.S. should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

Carter cited Israel's nuclear arsenal and those of the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France as proof that Iran would find it almost impossible to develop weapons and the missiles to deliver them in secret.

Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do U.S. officials deviate in public from Israel's line.

Meantime, UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei is slated to release his latest report on Tehran's uranium enrichment activities. The report is expected to be put before the IAEA Board of Governors' members on Monday.

Spending On Iraq Poorly Tracked

Audit Faults Accounting for $15 Billion in Work

Dang, that $15 billion was around here a few minutes ago.
Tom

By Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 23, 2008; D01



The inspector general for the Defense Department said yesterday that the Pentagon cannot account for almost $15 billion worth of goods and services ranging from trucks, bottled water and mattresses to rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns that were bought from contractors in the Iraq reconstruction effort.

The Pentagon did not have the proper documentation, including receipts, vouchers, signatures, invoices or other paperwork, for $7.8 billion that American and Iraqi contractors were paid for phones, folders, paint, blankets, Nissan trucks, laundry services and other items, according to a 69-page audit released to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

An earlier audit by the inspector general found deficiencies in accounting for $5.2 billion of U.S. payments to buy weapons, trucks, generators and other equipment for Iraq's security forces. In addition, the Defense Department spent $1.8 billion of seized Iraqi assets with "absolutely no accountability," according to Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who chairs the oversight committee. The Pentagon also kept poor records on $135 million that it paid to its partners in the multinational military force in Iraq, auditors said.

The Army disagreed with some of the auditors' findings, saying that it is difficult to maintain an adequate paper trail in a war zone and that it has improved its record-keeping and accountability efforts. Robert L. Wilkie, assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs, declined an invitation to testify before from Waxman's committee.

Of the $7.8 billion in payments detailed in the audit released yesterday, about $1.4 billion did not meet the most minimal requirements for documentation, making it highly possible that waste, fraud or abuse had occurred, according to auditors. In one case, there is a copy of a $5.6 million check from the U.S. Treasury paid to an Iraqi contractor but no documents saying what was purchased. In another, a South Carolina contractor was paid $11 million, according to a voucher, but auditors said they could not tell what goods or services were received.

"Without a receiving report and invoice, we don't know what we paid for," said Mary Ugone, the Defense Department's deputy inspector general for auditing. She said internal controls and paper trails were inadequate and that the Army's "finance personnel were not adequately trained" in overseeing the billions of dollars paid.

Auditors referred more than two dozen vouchers, totaling $35 million, to criminal investigators at the Pentagon.

Waxman said the poorly documented expenditures of seized Iraqi assets included a $320 million cash payment for employing 1,000 people that was handed over to the Iraqi Finance Ministry with "little more than a signature in exchange."

"Investigators looked at 53 payment vouchers and couldn't find even one that adequately explained where the money went," Waxman said.

The money paid to military coalition partners, including Britain, Poland and South Korea, was intended to help local reconstruction and humanitarian projects. Auditors said that none of the files reviewed "contained sufficient supporting documentation to provide reasonable assurance that these funds were used for their intended purpose." In one case, the Defense Department made an $8 million payment to Polish forces with minimal documentation, according to the audit.

An audit report issued in November found that $5.2 billion of U.S. payments to buy weapons, trucks, generators and other equipment to support Iraqi security forces had major deficiencies in how items were accounted for, saying that the Defense Department did not know "what equipment is due in, due out, issued and on hand." The inspector general found that the Defense Department could not account for 12,712 of 13,508 weapons, including assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers for Iraqi forces.

"When we turned them over to the Iraqis, they weren't properly accounted for," said Gary Comerford, a spokesman for the Defense Department's inspector general, saying serial numbers were not consistently recorded. "The paper trail is not complete."

The November audit also described how the Pentagon paid $32 million for the construction of an Iraqi military facility in Anbar province that was never built. Defense Department officials told staff members of the oversight committee that "this is embarrassing" because "not a spade of dirt was turned."

A Declaration of Independence From Israel

Posted on Jul 2, 2007
By Chris Hedges

Israel, without the United States, would probably not exist. The country came perilously close to extinction during the October 1973 war when Egypt, trained and backed by the Soviet Union, crossed the Suez and the Syrians poured in over the Golan Heights. Huge American military transport planes came to the rescue. They began landing every half-hour to refit the battered Israeli army, which had lost most of its heavy armor. By the time the war was over, the United States had given Israel $2.2 billion in emergency military aid.

The intervention, which enraged the Arab world, triggered the OPEC oil embargo that for a time wreaked havoc on Western economies. This was perhaps the most dramatic example of the sustained life-support system the United States has provided to the Jewish state.

Israel was born at midnight May 14, 1948. The U.S. recognized the new state 11 minutes later. The two countries have been locked in a deadly embrace ever since.

Washington, at the beginning of the relationship, was able to be a moderating influence. An incensed President Eisenhower demanded and got Israel’s withdrawal after the Israelis occupied Gaza in 1956. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli warplanes bombed the USS Liberty. The ship, flying the U.S. flag and stationed 15 miles off the Israeli coast, was intercepting tactical and strategic communications from both sides. The Israeli strikes killed 34 U.S. sailors and wounded 171. The deliberate attack froze, for a while, Washington’s enthusiasm for Israel. But ruptures like this one proved to be only bumps, soon smoothed out by an increasingly sophisticated and well-financed Israel lobby that set out to merge Israeli and American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Israel has reaped tremendous rewards from this alliance. It has been given more than $140 billion in U.S. direct economic and military assistance. It receives about $3 billion in direct assistance annually, roughly one-fifth of the U.S. foreign aid budget. Although most American foreign aid packages stipulate that related military purchases have to be made in the United States, Israel is allowed to use about 25 percent of the money to subsidize its own growing and profitable defense industry. It is exempt, unlike other nations, from accounting for how it spends the aid money. And funds are routinely siphoned off to build new Jewish settlements, bolster the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories and construct the security barrier, which costs an estimated $1 million a mile.

The barrier weaves its way through the West Bank, creating isolated pockets of impoverished Palestinians in ringed ghettos. By the time the barrier is finished it will probably in effect seize up to 40 percent of Palestinian land. This is the largest land grab by Israel since the 1967 war. And although the United States officially opposes settlement expansion and the barrier, it also funds them.

The U.S. has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems and given Israel access to some of the most sophisticated items in its own military arsenal, including Blackhawk attack helicopters and F-16 fighter jets. The United States also gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies. And when Israel refused to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, the United States stood by without a word of protest as the Israelis built the region’s first nuclear weapons program.

U.S. foreign policy, especially under the current Bush administration, has become little more than an extension of Israeli foreign policy. The United States since 1982 has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It refuses to enforce the Security Council resolutions it claims to support. These resolutions call on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

There is now volcanic anger and revulsion by Arabs at this blatant favoritism. Few in the Middle East see any distinction between Israeli and American policies, nor should they. And when the Islamic radicals speak of U.S. support of Israel as a prime reason for their hatred of the United States, we should listen. The consequences of this one-sided relationship are being played out in the disastrous war in Iraq, growing tension with Iran, and the humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza. It is being played out in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is gearing up for another war with Israel, one most Middle East analysts say is inevitable. The U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is unraveling. And it is doing so because of this special relationship. The eruption of a regional conflict would usher in a nightmare of catastrophic proportions.

There were many in the American foreign policy establishment and State Department who saw this situation coming. The decision to throw our lot in with Israel in the Middle East was not initially a popular one with an array of foreign policy experts, including President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Gen. George Marshall. They warned there would be a backlash. They knew the cost the United States would pay in the oil-rich region for this decision, which they feared would be one of the greatest strategic blunders of the postwar era. And they were right. The decision has jeopardized American and Israeli security and created the kindling for a regional conflagration.

The alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics. The Israel lobby has become a potent force in the American political system. No major candidate, Democrat or Republican, dares to challenge it. The lobby successfully purged the State Department of Arab experts who challenged the notion that Israeli and American interests were identical. Backers of Israel have doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to support U.S. political candidates deemed favorable to Israel. They have brutally punished those who strayed, including the first President Bush, who they said was not vigorous enough in his defense of Israeli interests. This was a lesson the next Bush White House did not forget. George W. Bush did not want to be a one-term president like his father.

Israel advocated removing Saddam Hussein from power and currently advocates striking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Direct Israeli involvement in American military operations in the Middle East is impossible. It would reignite a war between Arab states and Israel. The United States, which during the Cold War avoided direct military involvement in the region, now does the direct bidding of Israel while Israel watches from the sidelines. During the 1991 Gulf War, Israel was a spectator, just as it is in the war with Iraq.

President Bush, facing dwindling support for the war in Iraq, publicly holds Israel up as a model for what he would like Iraq to become. Imagine how this idea plays out on the Arab street, which views Israel as the Algerians viewed the French colonizers during the war of liberation.

“In Israel,” Bush said recently, “terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it’s not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that’s a good indicator of success that we’re looking for in Iraq.”

Americans are increasingly isolated and reviled in the world. They remain blissfully ignorant of their own culpability for this isolation. U.S. “spin” paints the rest of the world as unreasonable, but Israel, Americans are assured, will always be on our side.

Israel is reaping economic as well as political rewards from its lock-down apartheid state. In the “gated community” market it has begun to sell systems and techniques that allow the nation to cope with terrorism. Israel, in 2006, exported $3.4 billion in defense products—well over a billion dollars more than it received in American military aid. Israel has grown into the fourth largest arms dealer in the world. Most of this growth has come in the so-called homeland security sector.

“The key products and services,” as Naomi Klein wrote in The Nation, “are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems—precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror.’ ”

The United States, at least officially, does not support the occupation and calls for a viable Palestinian state. It is a global player, with interests that stretch well beyond the boundaries of the Middle East, and the equation that Israel’s enemies are our enemies is not that simple.

“Terrorism is not a single adversary,” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in The London Review of Books, “but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organizations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.”

Middle Eastern policy is shaped in the United States by those with very close ties to the Israel lobby. Those who attempt to counter the virulent Israeli position, such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell, are ruthlessly slapped down. This alliance was true also during the Clinton administration, with its array of Israel-first Middle East experts, including special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, one of the most powerful Israel lobbying groups in Washington. But at least people like Indyk and Ross are sane, willing to consider a Palestinian state, however unviable, as long as it is palatable to Israel. The Bush administration turned to the far-right wing of the Israel lobby, those who have not a shred of compassion for the Palestinians or a word of criticism for Israel. These new Middle East experts include Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the disgraced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser.

Washington was once willing to stay Israel’s hand. It intervened to thwart some of its most extreme violations of human rights. This administration, however, has signed on for every disastrous Israeli blunder, from building the security barrier in the West Bank, to sealing off Gaza and triggering a humanitarian crisis, to the ruinous invasion and saturation bombing of Lebanon.

The few tepid attempts by the Bush White House to criticize Israeli actions have all ended in hasty and humiliating retreats in the face of Israeli pressure. When the Israel Defense Forces in April 2002 reoccupied the West Bank, President Bush called on then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to “halt the incursions and begin withdrawal.” It never happened. After a week of heavy pressure from the Israel lobby and Israel’s allies in Congress, meaning just about everyone in Congress, the president gave up, calling Sharon “a man of peace.” It was a humiliating moment for the United States, a clear sign of who pulled the strings.

There were several reasons for the war in Iraq. The desire for American control of oil, the belief that Washington could build puppet states in the region, and a real, if misplaced, fear of Saddam Hussein played a part in the current disaster. But it was also strongly shaped by the notion that what is good for Israel is good for the United States. Israel wanted Iraq neutralized. Israeli intelligence, in the lead-up to the war, gave faulty information to the U.S. about Iraq’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And when Baghdad was taken in April 2003, the Israeli government immediately began to push for an attack on Syria. The lust for this attack has waned, in no small part because the Americans don’t have enough troops to hang on in Iraq, much less launch a new occupation.

Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon. Israel’s iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place. The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have failed. It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United States. It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal. It matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East.

The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare. American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war. The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete. The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests. There is no longer any debate within the United States. This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich. The political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high.

This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow. It means that American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline. And I fear it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East.

The weakening of the United States, economically and militarily, is giving rise to new centers of power. The U.S. economy, mismanaged and drained by the Iraq war, is increasingly dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasury securities. China holds dollar reserves worth $825 billion. If Beijing decides to abandon the U.S. bond market, even in part, it would cause a free fall by the dollar. It would lead to the collapse of the $7-trillion U.S. real estate market. There would be a wave of U.S. bank failures and huge unemployment. The growing dependence on China has been accompanied by aggressive work by the Chinese to build alliances with many of the world’s major exporters of oil, such as Iran, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. The Chinese are preparing for the looming worldwide clash over dwindling resources.

The future is ominous. Not only do Israel’s foreign policy objectives not coincide with American interests, they actively hurt them. The growing belligerence in the Middle East, the calls for an attack against Iran, the collapse of the imperial project in Iraq have all given an opening, where there was none before, to America’s rivals. It is not in Israel’s interests to ignite a regional conflict. It is not in ours. But those who have their hands on the wheel seem determined, in the name of freedom and democracy, to keep the American ship of state headed at breakneck speed into the cliffs before us.

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U.S. shooters feel pinch as ammo costs soar

Mon May 19, 2008 8:12pm EDT
By Tim Gaynor

TOMBSTONE, Ariz (Reuters) - Gunslinger Bob Krueger blasts away at his outlaw rivals at a tourist show in this storied Old West town, although rising ammo costs may force him to choose his shots.

Krueger and his gnarly band of pistoleros are among millions of shooters, hunters and even lawmen across the United States feeling the pinch as sky-high metals prices and demand from wars abroad are driving up the price of bullets.

Ammo prices for many popular guns have more than tripled in the last three years, driven in large part by surging demand for metals in rapidly industrializing China.

As the Asian giant becomes wealthier, millions of tons of copper, lead and zinc, which are also used to make bullets and brass shell-casings, are being snapped up.

Shooters, gun dealers and sheriffs say the impact has been further aggravated by competition for limited ammo stocks with the U.S. military, currently fighting wars on two fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Everybody is feeling it," said Krueger, a Stetson wearing cowboy whose show blasts through hundreds of rounds of blank ammo each week at Six Gun City in Tombstone.

"If things get bad enough, we may all just get one bullet each," he said, to laughter from his grizzled buddies.

HUNTING FOR AMMO

Dealers complain that the cost of rifle ammunition has doubled and even tripled in the past two years, with similar increases for some hand gun ammunition.

Lynn Kartchner, a gun shop owner in nearby Douglas, Arizona, says he now pays $250 for a case of 1,000 rounds of assault rifle ammunition, up from $80 two years ago, while a box of popular 9 mm shells has jumped to $17 from $10.

"Price rises have been accompanied by scarcity for certain kinds of ammo," Kartchner told Reuters in his shop, which is packed with rifles, pistols and shooting paraphernalia.

"There isn't as much variety, and a lot of people snap up whatever they can get their hands on," he added.

Increased costs and competition for ammo is also being born by police forces across the United States, among them the sheriff's department in Cochise County on the Arizona-Mexico border, which faces incursions from armed smugglers and even bandits from south of the line.

Last year the department faced a four-month delay acquiring rifle cartridges and had to dip into ammo reserves, rousing the concern of Sheriff Larry Dever.

"We do face people in this environment down here who are heavily armed, sometimes with higher capacity armaments than we carry," Dever said.

"The last thing we want do is find ourselves in a situation where we are not training sufficiently so that (deputies) can maintain those very important proficiencies," he added.

HOARDING, RELOADING

Demand for metals is tipped to stay strong in China for the next decade.

Cowboy shows and lawmen aside, high ammo prices are being shouldered by millions of target shooters and hunters across the United States, many of them working people on a limited budget.

"If you have three of four children, and they all go out on a hunting trip, the cost of ammo can be a bit of a burden," said Luis Hernandez, a keen deer, bird and varmint hunter from Douglas.

To keep costs low, many hobby shooters are now scouring gun shows, gun shops and the Internet in search of cheap ammunition, which some then buy in bulk and hoard against further price rises.

Others either shoot less, switch to smaller caliber ammunition such as .22 which is cheaper, or are increasingly turning to reloading their old shell cases.

"The main saving is in the brass casing, which is the most expensive part," said Hernandez, who reckons on saving up to $20 on a box of some premium rifle cartridges by reloading.

Other shooters and dealers are holding out hope that ammunition manufacturers will develop cheaper alternatives.

"High cost drives innovation," said Kartchner. "There has been some interest in plastic or aluminum cartridge cases in the past, so I'm hopeful they will come up with something. We'll just have to see."

(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Additional reporting by Ed Stoddard; Editing by Eddie Evans)

'Tweedle Dumb' and 'Tweedle Dee' walking off in the sunset.....

US-Led Capitalist System Headed for Collapse?

Syed Rashid Husain, Arab News —

Oil prices continue to rise and rise, with no end in sight. Virtually all other commodities seem to be following to be the same suit. Some now say a new economic system is emerging from the ashes of the old and now crumbling financial structure. Failing to meet even the basic needs of the common man, the current economic system is facing its worst crisis and appears in doldrums. It has miserably failed the underprivileged of this world.

Markets appear divorced from the fundamentals. F. William Engdahl strongly says in a recent write up that the oil markets (and other markets too) today are controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60 percent of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price.

And the end-result is growing deprivation to a large number of people across geographical boundaries!

In the 90’s, with the war in Afghanistan taking its toll, the Soviet empire virtually melted before our eyes under its own weight. The number of deprived, form Moscow to Siberia and Grozny started to grow and grow rapidly. And as the number of have-nots in then USSR rose, the system could not cope with the pressures, and failed to provide even the basic needs to the common man in the streets. And within years the mighty and the powerful USSR was assigned into the annals of history.

Analysts today point to the Afghan war as one of the major causes for the disintegration of the USSR. Many then rejoiced over the demise of the USSR, claiming the capitalist system has won the war — finally. Many in the West, including the Regan Administration claimed supremacy of the capitalist system over the Marxist ideals. The victory of the West was described in terms of ideologies.

Current developments also point to a new emerging reality. The capitalist economy now seem to be failing its underprivileged, the have-nots of the world. With the number of people below the poverty line growing rapidly all over the globe, the common man on the streets today appear more and more desperate today.

In sharp contrast to this grim reality, it is only a few, the haves of the world, controlling the capital, benefiting from the current scenario. The vast majority is now being deprived of two square meals a day too. The old Malthusian theory, which has been lying dormant in the shelves for quite sometime, seem to be back and people have started to look at it closely once again. And this is happening in this 21st century, when the world claims to have taken tremendous strides in the fields of science and technology. What a growth indeed!

The people to benefit out of this imbroglio are the money vendors, the rich of the world. Real estate and property boom has been the engine of growth all around. Conservative economists do not accept investments in real estate as really contributing toward the growth of the economy. Terming it as stagnant investment, these conservative economists continue to claim, growth in the real estate sector does not contribute significantly to the over all GDP of an economy. And secondly it is only the fortunate few who could benefit out of this boom — and at the cost of poor many.

Unable to come up to the expectations of the vast majority of the common man, many seem asking the question today, is the capitalist economy also passing through its last phases? The situation is grim for a vast majority. Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the year to the end of January, markedly accelerating an upturn that began, gently at first, in 2002.

Since then, prices have risen 65 percent. In 2007 alone, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 percent and grain 42 percent. The World Bank estimates that 33 countries around the world face potential political and social unrest because of the acute hike in food and energy prices.

And this has resulted in disastrous social consequences for the billions below the poverty line in the impoverished, underdeveloped world. The scenario is so bleak for the common man on street that the world is witnessing food riots virtually all across the globe. People of the world are hungry in this era of growth and emancipation!

Where are we being led? We are living in a different world with a new era seeming to dawn upon us. In the 21st century, when the world was supposed to be at the click of a mouse, the number of hungry population, those who can’t afford proper food three times a day has increased. It seems, the age of scarcity, of shortages, of rising prices, of food riots, of ration cards, is finally upon us, all around the globe.

What is happening, that with the weakening of the ruling currency of the world, the US dollar, the moneyed class of the world — sans frontiers in this age of freedom and liberty- is moving their capital into commodities — from oil to gold and grains.

This paper transaction, at times termed as speculation, is taking place even without the physical transfer of the goods and is making a mockery of the conservative economic models. And this is contributing to the current imbroglio. Unfortunately only the moneyed class has the capacity to participate and benefit from this entire game — at the cost of the poor.

Religious scholars tell that Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) did not permit transactions in which physical transaction of the goods under question did not take place. And in the current situation, rarely is the physical transaction taking place.

This paper circulation is contributing to this rise of virtually all commodities — oil included. If it continues the same way, it may not be too wrong to point out that like the Marxist ideals, the current era of capitalism may also not last long. It may already be in its final throes, some hence deduce.

If a system cannot meet the basic idea of having some sort of equity within the society, where the have-nots could not have at least three meals a day, then it is bound to fizzle out, proponents of the theory underline.

The war in Afghanistan turned out to be the Achilles heel of the Russian empire and who knows the two concurrent wars, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, is leading the US-led capitalist economic system toward the same fate? Only time has the answer to this trillion dollar question.