US troops engage further in Colombia

The United States has deployed troops in eastern Colombia in an area rich of oil and widely seen as a stronghold of Marxist rebels.

US special forces have begun training Colombian troops in counter-insurgency techniques in the province of Arauca.

The army is trying to protect an oil pipeline which has been attacked 200 times in the last two years alone.

It is the first time the US military has been directly involved in Colombia's 39-year civil war.
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Car Wars
The US Economy Needs Oil Like a Junkie Needs Heroin - And Iraq Will Supply Its Next Fix

War in Iraq is inevitable. That there would be war was decided by North American planners in the mid-1920s. That it would be in Iraq was decided much more recently. The architects of this war were not military planners but town planners. War is inevitable not because of weapons of mass destruction, as claimed by the political right, nor because of western imperialism, as claimed by the left. The cause of this war, and probably the one that will follow, is car dependence.

The US has paved itself into a corner. Its physical and economic infrastructure is so highly car dependent that the US is pathologically addicted to oil. Without billions of barrels of precious black sludge being pumped into the veins of its economy every year, the nation would experience painful and damaging withdrawal.
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