Poppies and Minerals
Show Date: July 1, 2010
Why did America go to a war that wasn’t a war and couldn’t be won in a place most Americans didn’t care about?
The stated explanation focused on foreign terrorists who killed Americans in New York.
The majority of these terrorists held Saudi passports, but their leader lived in a cave in a distant, poppy-rich country.
The Man Who Lived in a Cave in a Dirt-Rich Country
The world knew that he lived in a cave because he often sent video tapes to the media filmed in one cave or another – warning that he would continue his killing spree. And everyone was furious.
But the real reasons were more complex. First, American and international drug companies needed all the poppy seeds they could control in order to churn them into billions of pills.
Secondly, a trillion dollars worth of precious minerals and diamonds was buried beneath the rocks of this impoverished, poppy-rich nation.
The mineral discovery was revealed nearly a decade after the war against the man in a cave began, though All-Powerful men knew it from the start.
Americans were shocked to learn that their soldier sons were dying for a dirt-poor country that was really dirt-rich.
The man in a cave had many supporters, most too young to drive a car in America. Yet, his boy-soldiers drove our finest troops into the ground with the guns that we provided before we went to war against the man in a cave.
For reasons that no one could explain, American troops were often placed in harm’s way – especially when the world wasn’t watching.
Platoons were even ordered to fight from basins surrounded by mountains – called kill zones – where we let the enemy kill our soldiers in order to keep the war that wasn’t a war going.
Platoons were also ordered to fight without adequate supplies and water. When enough died or were wounded, we withdrew those who survived and left the kill zones to their killers.
The soldiers complained, but few were listening, least of all the All-Powerful men who couldn’t be named or blamed. In fact, the All-Powerful men who ran the war that couldn’t be won were invisible.
There were no All-Powerful women in the invisible club, except as as wives, lovers and massage therapists. How do we know that? Because no woman alive at the time was so greedy or vile as to trade money and power for the life of another woman’s son.
And so it went, until one day, America declared victory by losing the war that couldn’t be won – withdrawing the remnants of the greatest fighting force, and replacing them with platoons of geologists, drillers and bankers.
The man who lived in a cave moved to a large white house next to a military base. He was finally located, killed and buried at sea.
The invisible men who instigated and secretly managed the war were by now filthy rich.
But then the most amazing thing happened. The invisible men became hunted prey just like the soldiers they sent to die in kill zones.
The price on their heads was so high that they fled to caves in the dirt-rich country they plundered for diamonds, minerals and poppy seeds.