In one way or another, the US will soon become both capital-and-energy-resource-challenged to an extreme, perhaps to the extreme where we can't feed ourselves

Kunstler: The combination of extreme resource dependency and religious fanaticism is a fatal equation for the Middle East. They are angry, crazy and often savage people who own something we can't live without, and we are overfed buffoons, often savage ourselves, who think we can make them like us -- whether they like it or not.

Kunstler: Perhaps our adversaries are content that we have committed suicide by securitized debt and they are enjoying the spectacle of watching the American economy slide down history's cloaca maxima. Personally, I think if another violent aggression had been staged by "terrorists" on the 9/11 scale soon after that, our response would have had to be the turning of some Islamic capital cities into ashtrays -- but I venture into the realm of the hypothetically unutterable.

SHOOT: As always, astute if bleak commentary from Jim.

clipped from kunstler.com I don't think the Pentagon or the State Department give a rat's ass about the Afghan state or how its hard-bitten denizens scratch a living out of the tortured landscape there. Our motive there since the initial whacking of the Taliban government in 2001 has been to use it as the eastern geographic wedge against Iran, with Iraq as the western wedge, making a nice sandwich of Iran between two garrisons of US Wonder Bread.  Hold that thought for a moment while I digress. Why is this necessary or desirable?  Because the world depends on a reliable oil supply out of the Middle East and would descend into chaos if that supply was interrupted.  This is apart, even, from the USA's desperate need for the 10 percent of our oil that we get from the region. Have we prevented chaos in the Middle East or only provoked it? Again, personally, I don't believe the status quo will persist a whole lot longer. The US economy is radically de-complexifying (i.e. crashing).