BANGKOK, Thailand -- Cambodian officials are investigating why a huge crowd panicked during a joyful Water Festival in Phnom Penh and stampeded across a narrow bridge, killing at least 378 people in Cambodia's worst tragedy since the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" regime.

Emergency teams, survivors and distraught relatives and friends desperately searched on Tuesday (November 23) among corpses strewn on the bridge and floating in the river.

Many of the dead were later laid on the ground in rows, under white cloth, at hospitals before being packed into coffins for cremation.

Police wearing white rubber gloves gently lifted the hands of dead people and pushed their limp fingertips onto blackened ink pads, and then onto paper, for identification records.

Authorities also posted photographs of victims for public viewing, hoping to identify the dead and injured.

The tragedy occurred Monday (November 22) night, during the final celebration of the three-day Water Festival which marks the end of the tropical rainy season in the impoverished Buddhist-majority country.

The war in Afghanistan is about perpetual war, not Afghanistan.

It's about preventing democracy in the United States, not bringing it to Southwest Asia.

And it is the tombstone of the Obama Presidency.

To justify the fight, they've rounded up the usual suspects: Terror. Oil. Minerals. Poppies. Democracy.

But George Orwell's 1984---now updated with important new books--- illuminates the bigger picture: "continuous warfare" is the key to social control.

It keeps the public frightened and dependent.

And it keeps "the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed."

Better to destroy them in a ritual slaughter like Afghanistan, and wherever is next.

For a truly prosperous society, educated and secure, cannot be ruled by the few. Poverty, ignorance and fear are the three pillars of authoritarian control. Without war, they all disappear.

Thus Afghanistan. Before it: the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, central America. After: whoever else is handy.

Why should George W. Bush have been “angry” to learn in late 2007 of the unanimous judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon four years earlier? Seems to me he might have said “Hot Dog!” rather than curse under his breath.

Nowhere in his memoir, Decision Points, is Bush’s bizarre relationship to truth so manifest as when he describes his dismay at learning that the intelligence community had redeemed itself for its lies about Iraq by preparing an honest Estimate that stuck a rod in the wheels of the juggernaut rolling toward war with Iran.

Nowhere is Bush’s abiding conviction clearer, now as then, that his role as “decider” included the ability to create his own reality.

The Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) has missed that part of the book. And hundreds of Dallas “sheriffs,” assembled to protect the decorum at the Bush library groundbreaking last week, kept us hoi polloi well out of presidential earshot.

I recall the first sentence of my fifth grade essay on "Education and Youth". Written with the occasional aid of my father, and dotted with clichés, it might have read something like this:

"Youth is the backbone of any nation, and education is essential to arm the youth with the knowledge they need to lead their societies toward change, progress and prosperity."

The grayish blue pencil I used to write my essay with was one of several items handed annually by United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff to refugee children in many schools scattered throughout the Gaza Strip. My Arabic teacher was Abu Kamal al-Hanafi, a wonderful man with a terrible temper, who was also the Imam of the local mosque. My classroom had exactly 62 students. My desk was as old as the Israeli occupation of Gaza, if not older. The roof was filled with holes, creating an exciting spectacle as birds flew in and out, often nesting in available spaces. Watching these scenes made the brutish Arabic grammar lessons bearable, and eased the fear caused by Abu Kamal’s bouts of anger and the occasional Israeli gunfire in and around the refugee camp.

The endless and infinite "war on terra" is bankrupting the planet. I don't mean moral bankruptcy; that goes without saying. I mean financial bankruptcy. And don't take my word for it. This is the argument made in a new book called "Terrorism and the Economy: How the War on Terror Is Bankrupting the World," by Loretta Napoleoni, a financial reporter for Internazionale, l'Unita, il Caffe, Mondo e Missione, El Pais, Vanity Fair Spain, and Vanity Fair Italy.

Perhaps Napoleoni is insufficiently subservient to Wall Street to write for U.S. newspapers -- unlike, say, the United States government: "Washington needs Wall Street's help to keep international investors funding the U.S. debt," the author explains, "which in turn provides the $1.6 billion needed each month to keep troops in Iraq and Afghanistan." Which explains the lack of criminal prosecutions and serious regulation of Wall Street.