it started as the war on terror spawned by the deadliest here is attack in history either with us here with the enemy that's that's clear but the circle of america's enemies grew quickly and included nations that had nothing to do with nine eleven terrorists they were defined by george bush as the axis of evil some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since september the eleventh but we know that actual nature north korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction while starving its citizens iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror while an unelected few repress the iranian people's hope for freedom. if you back and change the chart to show us to lead toward america and to support terror two years after nine eleven the us invaded iraq on the grounds that he had weapons of mass destruction and was doing business with al qaida grounds which proved to be fobs

hundreds of thousands of iraqi civilians have died since the invasion they used the moment in in the wake of nine eleven to divert from afghanistan a real target should have been our real target and go to iraq would also was the low hanging fruit north korea was part more dangerous too difficult hundred thousand casualties. on both sides seoul would be destroyed iran was too difficult seventy million people not fractured like the iraqis and the sunni and shia and christian and other as for the motives behind invading iraq some talk or oil iraq right now is sitting on probably two hundred billion barrels maybe three hundred billion barrels that's correct on all report well he plans to be a thirteen million barrels per day production capacity in seven years that surpasses saudi arabia now you know why dick cheney went to war with others blame america's self assigned group as the world's policeman the driving idea behind it is that edge of monic stability of the idea is but world is going to be

a more secure place overall if there is a uniform world a sole remaining superpower much of what has happened post nine eleven in the name of responding to nine eleven has been a pretext as terrorism was no longer the only reason for landing on washington's enemy list the us had even more far reaching plans on the table former vice president dick cheney says he had courage to bush administration to bomb syria at one time because of its alleged nuclear weapons program a move which experts say would have had is that stress in fact on the region president obama was elected on hopes that he would answers the endless wars. overseas which most americans are opposed to but he continues and adds one more another which nation lead yet and this time in the name of removing an evil dictator. some worry syria could be next we have

a an executive power that is beyond any check by the people by the congress or by the courts for war we can go toward the drop of a coin we've reached the point now where the president the united states can kill people for state purposes any time you're she with feels the need since nine eleven america's war on terror has crossed many borders from pakistan to yemen and other countries the chase for a handful of terrorists has turned the lives of entire nations upside down we're talking about hundreds of thousands of innocent lives taken by the decade of constant war and many worry that a tragedy as great as nine eleven has served as a pretext for an even greater tragedy one that has no end in sight i'm going to check our reporting from washington our king. so now i want to bring ivan eland back into this conversation to talk about that report and we were just talking about nuclear energy and iran's desire for you know possible nuclear capabilities

which we don't know but does this add to iran wanting or feeling like they need a nuclear weapon when you have the united states calling them out as the axis of evil along with iraq and then going to war with iraq i think the report was very good and i disliked the tie a few loose ends to give i think you know if you're iran you put yourself in the place of iran which we need to do more and you and you see that iraq is taken out they gave up their weapons of mass destruction libya clearly gave up their weapons of mass destruction no doubt about that they get attacked. north korea that already has a few warheads they don't get attacked and they're of course as the piece pointed out much closer to getting long range ballistic missiles to hit the u.s. there are all these countries have a problem getting these missiles two. that are sufficient range to hit the united states about to say they couldn't ever do it but in the absolute worst case i think what you're seeing is that iran works out and sees this and says well the only it

concludes the same thing that the indian defense minister did at the first gulf war when they asked him what lessons did you learn he said get nuclear weapons that keeps the americans out right so the u.s. never looks at its own actions to see if we're not encouraging proliferation in countries like this we just think well they're evil we have to constrain them but when they see this they're just redouble their efforts to bury the stuff in underground so you can't get attacked like the israelis sometimes do or by the u.s. or whomever so that they just get nuclear weapons if you want to be protected from an invasion of the united states but i want to talk about a little bit of the u.s. foreign policy here because back then you had george bush talking about iran and iraq as the axis of evil going to war with iraq and the nine eleven commission never found that either of them were involved in the nine eleven. terror attacks was this just used by george bush to justify whatever it wanted with people that the united states enemies of the time he wanted to take out saddam hussein i mean

the two hated each other. some of them one we guarded hussein is a corrupt secular arab dictator which he was right but of course osama bin laden is an evil islamicist terrorist but they hated each other right so they weren't colluding in iraq and there's no evidence to show that and it was kind of a farfetched thing in the in the media despite many neoconservatives trying to make these two links and i so i think you know there was clearly an attempt to go after iraq and use nine eleven to do so and of course the terrorism spiked the statistics spiked after us invaded iraq so of course that made the terrorism worse and that's not that's even if you exclude the terrorist attacks against u.s. forces in iraq so i'm talking about worldwide terrorist attacks i see other things i don't greatly oh i didn't step on your own your tongue but i just want to get this question in because now as we look at libya and syria is this a foreign policy that has continued by the united states the you can extrapolate to

invading or getting involved in syria yes i don't think we've learned anything since nine eleven because we never ask ourselves the question why are these people attacking us course we never do that with pro harbor either in the press that's a tendency of americans this history starts with the attack and of course one always said that the reason they attacked the attack this was u.s. meddling in islamic countries tactically in saudi arabia so i think and it's very feasible in these countries minds that the u.s. is going to attack another leaving more and of course now are meddling in libya and somalia and yemen so i would argue that bush has even taken the bomb has taken bush's war and just spread it out he's rich drawing perhaps from iraq and maybe perhaps eventually from afghanistan but he's going it's all these other countries and so you see iran but. you know they have this fear but let's say in the worst case that iran gets a few warheads i mean we have thousands of words we have the most powerful nuclear arsenal here in the u.s. in the world and they can we can deter an attack from

a country that has three warheads so why do we need to take out these were right it's a great point and it just shows how close the far but not far foreign policy is timed in the last ten years since nine eleven thank you so much for me and i was i've been ill and senior fellow at the independent institute and that is going to go for now for more on the stories we covered at r.t. dot com slash usa check out our you tube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america and come back here in a half hour for more news. wealthy

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we'll. bring you the latest in science and technology from around the world. the future coverage. sometimes we think that it's easier to make war and to work to create an attack or to clean up after it the military is a major player in terms of environmental outcomes.

the environment is wars silent casualties when we talk about a cost of four we rarely focus on what happens to the way or the animals we rarely focus on that which sustains who are. completely out of sync now in defining threats to our security. at one time the principal threats were in the water they no longer are there now environmental in the homeland security department they're speaking about vulnerability and preparedness and we just haven't made the same commitment yet in climate change but we really need to do that at the minute it sit for sleepwalking insta zoster we can't afford to straight walk into the future we must take decisions and action which creation of world that we want our children and nature of friendship.

war has changed much over the centuries yet our perception of war has changed

a little we memorialize the fallen take some note of collateral damage to civilians but in calculating the cost of war we seldom acknowledge its toll on the natural environment. when one deals with warfare one has to realize that this tremendous amounts of damage that have done not just human damage but damage the physical environment in which the battlefield takes place and whether it's a small war of a couple of days or whether it's a major war will one war two vietnam war or the recent wars in the middle east tremendous amounts of damage done by aerial bombs by napalm. chemicals that are used i would say there's very little consideration during combat operations to the effect on the environment what one gets totally preoccupied in the firefight it's

about. after major combat operations are over in almost any where you have unexploded ordinance. staggered about the landscape you deny the use of agricultural land to the population you can post tension only in fact water supply and the food chain and i would say that that's basically the case almost anywhere that you use fire power either air power to laurie. the primary goal in warfare is to beat the enemy and when you want to defeat the enemy as quickly and as. for the cost effectively as you'd like but you use the most dangerous weapons you can for the most part unless you're your own troops or your own population happens to be on the battlefield. with three six barrel got blamed on each capable of firing up to six

men one of these dragon ships every day. when i arrived in vietnam. february one thousand nine hundred seventy. there was a really a very teal of destruction and we were taken out on missions mainly by helicopter our missions were called search and destroy we would try to search out the enemy and destroy the enemy in the coup cheery. there were in numerable tunnels and usually we would try to blow these tunnels up with him for explosives. and we seldom saw our main enemy we tried to destroy the earth that concealed and sustain the enemy i often wonder if our struggle is not against human beings but against the

earth that sustains them. we've become experts and going to the earth using bombs artillery mortars c. four gunships and they plan to reduce the earth to ashes. you know in the history of life on earth they have been five moments. and which they span a major spasm of extinction and the best known is when the time a source left the stage as it were we are now clearly in the first stages of a potential sixth spasm of extinction we human footprint on nature this is just quite you can see the increase greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you can see it in the proliferating dead zone some coastal waters around the world you

can see it in the oceans becoming acid in terms of warm preparations for war to come so a list of things in itself whether it's. are sonic booms a factory marine mammals or it's the burning oil fields in iraq or it's destroyed coral reefs high in the pacific for ramming purposes are the worst just goes on and on in war time damage to habitat and wildlife is a given sometimes unintended sometimes the result of a deliberate strategy one of the listing samples of the environmental impact of welfare the same during the iraq invasion of kuwait in one nine hundred ninety one and the deliberate igniting of the oil will seem to right by saddam hussein streets but also stealing a vast amounts of oil tens of millions of barrels of oil into the patient gulf

region from the side it cherub will affect on the marine farm and on the life in the area by my criteria and when i shift there it's. on so it was in that is it had is fine and i will tender days it is not just a collection of and billions of paddock was of sand it is that is an ecosystem and for vast amounts of oil into a consistent that is terribly destructive for. all's fair in love and war as they say and that's why. aircraft will hit the chemical industry they'll sink tankers will hit nuclear power plants will hit anything that might bring a society or a city or wherever you're fighting it to its knees as quickly as possible with tremendous amounts than likely of environmental damage such deliberate targeting of the environment during the vietnam war prompted the addition of article fifty five the protocol one to the geneva conventions article fifty five of protocol one

additional to the geneva conventions nineteen forty nine states that care shall be taken and swore to protect the environment against widespread long term and severe damage to the united states. although it is excepted almost all of the provisions protocol one has taken exception to that. in our bombing campaign and nineteen ninety nine most of which did not capitulate and just a few days as we had anticipated and we bombed for seventy eight days we bombed oil refineries resulting in a mile long oil slicks that extended down the danube through remaining into the black sea. we. had true chemical plants and

fertilizer factories spreading mercury. other carcinogens on the landscape and into a canal that lead into the danube river it will take the eco systems decades to recover. forests are among the ecosystems that are most often damaged or destroyed in combat itself the main reason for that is because they are very useful for guerrillas trying to find concealment from forces with superior firepower forty years ago when united states was trying to prevail in vietnam and its enemies the vietcong were using the force for concealment the american forces tried through fire and chemical defoliants to clear large parts of

the forests of vietnam. not in build up what. they think of themselves as wrong on the basis of how. they fly seven days in the week fifty two weeks and. most days the planes spew out a total of nearly eighteen thousand gallons of people here. from one hundred sixty to one thousand nine hundred seventy one u.s. military conducted a large scale defoliation drive code named operation ranch hand planes helicopters and tanker trucks sprayed nineteen million gallons of herbicides on south vietnam. i should mention agent orange which was also one of the main ways that the why and was ravaged a place that had been sprayed would die and sometimes the we

sort of say banana plants would become enormous and then they would die and it looked like a ghost landscape almost everything had been killed agent orange was developed actually in world war two at that time it was not thought that this had any effect on human beings so this became a wonderful commercial product but also a very potent product that could be used to just. jungles to destroy from crops to be able to be used as a tactical weapon of war without being considered chemical warfare in the sense of raising gas they think percent of the asian aren't consisted of a chemical called two four or five tea which. unless the conditions of manufacture were carefully controlled would become contaminated with dioxin which is an

extraordinarily potent toxic chemical so much of the agent orange or this purpose or that was sprayed in vietnam was heavily contaminated the americans did not will be defiled in homs humans for animals. and the like something wrong with muslims like mobility for the ageing vietnamese with packing more anyway these are national problem i don't just put them on the moon for them it's no more than another mission accomplished. in one nine hundred eighty four us veterans who attributed a variety of adverse physical symptoms to agent orange exposure settled out of court with the manufacturers twenty years later their families fought to have a plaque added to the vietnam veterans memorial it states in memory of the men and women served in the vietnam war and later died as a result of their service we honor and remember their sacrifice. knew that the

united states government nor the manufacturers of agent orange compensated the vietnamese people. when we first started working on afghanistan one of the things that surprised me was that it it actually was an area where natural and wild pistachio woodlands grew i didn't know that they actually existed there before and in fact they were a significant part of the pre-war economy people picked at the stash and actually exported them and it was worth millions of dollars as a source of income to people. in the deforestation we see in afghanistan is a product of three forces first of all you have the hygiene that we are using the forests for cover the soviets destroyed some of the forest to prevent that second of all you have the afghans themselves harvested the forests and stockpiled the wood because they feared that they be taken away during the collected by station process . and third you had land mines were put in agricultural areas by putting the land

mines that are cultural areas that forced people to find other areas to grow food and the most obvious where the the forests and woodlands in the country so those three factors have led to virtual one hundred percent deforestation in some areas and this photo was taken during a field study from the united nations environment program holes in the soil indicate were trees have been uprooted to plant crops. after three decades of war only the smallest patches of forest remain in northern afghanistan barely detectable by satellite and the reason we don't see some of these woodlands and forests regenerating is also complex at the moment if the seedling happens to take root and start growing you actually have grazing of goats and sheep over virtually the entire landscape and those codes and sheep obviously simply eat anything that comes up so what we saw in a in

a number of different sample areas was not a single seedling had taken root. when you have such fragile soils and you have such heavy grazing on them you really amplify and cause soil erosion to the point where recovery is going to be extremely difficult if not impossible. but. it was funny i actually started with my barber when i was probably ten years old he was a marine. who had fought in the battle of while could help solve my own storm world war two i heard the stories of his experiences of storing the beaches running out of supplies and. sword fighting with the japanese soldiers on the islands just for . they saw their supply ship people want to buy japanese aircraft to try

to explain that feeling of of seeing their food and their source of self-defense just completely destroyed from their eyes. i was doing some research on oil spills in general off the australian coast and that that story came back to me and i thought well his ship is still there and i but the oil still aboard. there are nearly four thousand world war two ship wrecks in the south pacific right now and over three hundred of those are oil tankers. if no measures are taken on this the ships will collapse they will release their oil. one side oil answers the marine environment will be very difficult to remove it. the pacific's highest concentration of world war two wrecks can be found in the federated states of micronesia to cloak room service forward anchorage for the japanese imperial fleet until an air attack by american forces sank sixty ships and more than two

hundred planes the way that the reefs are struggling around the world due to coral bleaching global warming over fishery and dynamite fishery added to those stresses a massive oil spill would just be the last nail in the coffin for these waves they would not be able to regenerate and. so i think that a war that we have. in the last century could still be destroying our future is really pretty shocking. and it's distracting things that current warfare is set up is just it's across may not at the scene of the victims of wolf a cowardly civilians and this is a real turnaround about one hundred kilo say yes and at the static last century when i was about there who is that ten percent in the gym some who are civilians and about ninety percent military and that it's the opposite. and what's in the

recently painted surface separte family since world war two he is that we see more and more mean issues to assign military effect the invasion of kuwait by iraq and the cleanup of kuwait after the one thousand ninety one gulf war is a very good example of the problems and the challenges of cleaning up the battlefield. after the war there was an enormous amount of refuse from the battles that took place these were trucks tanks aircraft all sorts of ordnance a lot of it unexploded and what happened was the allied troops came in and they basically picked up all this metal debris and piled it in giant piles the size of a football field in various parts of the kuwaiti desert and left it there i felt like a lot of clutter i mean so from time to time these piles go up in flames and from time to time they explode here and there.