Obama’s surge strategy is beginning to take shape, and it isn’t encouraging for those of us who question this ongoing occupation (and who have questioned the war since the beginning). 
The Times of London quotes a U.S. commander as describing this action in terms of a “D-Day Moment”, but in the context of a conflict that has lasted nearly twice as long as America’s part in World War II, this would seem in relative terms more like a second. Also, rather than attacking the flank of the most powerful military force in the world, we are invading a battered, impoverished region of one of the planet’s most miserable nations – a place where people struggle to subsist, and where large-scale conflict will likely result in a major displacement of the population, perhaps approaching the scale of what is now occurring across the border in Pakistan’s tribal departments.
I guess it’s up to all of us to ask, how much more of this? We’ve been in Afghanistan for almost eight years, and we are further from the place we’d said we were going than when we started. Setting aside the basic illegitimacy of our invasion, the simple fact that we’ve been there so long with neither a clear mission nor an end point in sight would be enough to sour the public’s taste for this imperial project. Unfortunately, with the change of administration, it’s as though someone has pushed the reset button. The Bush team fucked it up, the argument goes, so Obama needs to set things straight. As the president said, we took our eye off the “ball” by invading Iraq – thus the crime of invading Iraq becomes a rationale for compounding the crime of invading Afghanistan. We’re acting like a serial killer, one driven on by his/her own twisted logic. Someone grab a bit stick. (Make mine wintergreen.)
All right, I know… I’ve gotten on my soap box about this before, but the reason why these lousy, pointless wars have so much staying power is that there is NO CONSCRIPTION and NO 
WAR TAX LEVIES. Our system has corrected for this oversight, which proved the undoing of our last major imperial enterprise – the Indochina wars. By eliminating these two age-old institutional pillars of warfare, we have effectively disconnected the bulk of our population from the costs of warfare. Fueled by borrowed treasure and the victims of economic misfortune, our wars have become self-perpetuating. Afghanistan and Iraq are going to be a great deal harder to stop than was Vietnam (and it was hard to stop the Vietnam war, with the end coming far too late for the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). This flurry of recent fighting is just another flare up in what has proven a far longer, more difficult campaign than anyone thought going in. The real D-Day question is, when will our V-E day arrive?
Here’s another question: Will anyone notice that it’s over, other than the poor fuckers who have to fight it?
luv u,
jp
Nah, Big Green’s not doing oldies – no sweat, man. Been there, done that. Besides, if you try to pull that off in the Crab Nebula, they’ll cook you for dinner. Literally. (Ask 
our notes, all of our old song lists, and pore through the lot, writing down the ones we want to do, crossing out the ones we don’t. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has his personal favorites, and his understanding of music is limited to a few lines from the 1956 World Book Encyclopedia, which his inventor Mitch Macaphee inserted into his memory banks as test data. (Hey… he’s going to be traveling with us to the great beyond, so why not allow him a few requests, right? I said, am I right? Hel-looooo?)
York State Senate. In fact, in the midst of our desperation, we’ve asked Mitch Macaphee for his assistance. (Sometimes a mad scientist can see his way out of a conundrum much more easily than, say, an unemployed musician or an oversized root vegetable.) It took Mitch about three hours to come up with a solution of sorts. He walked in from his lab with a small, oblong metal box which he called the “Tune-o-matic.” He pressed a red button on the right side of the machine, and a slip of paper emerged from a small slot on the opposite side. The paper has some writing on it that appeared to be in Vietnamese. Mitch took one look at that and stormed out of the room with the tune-o-matic under one arm. There has since been some banging and swearing from behind the closed door of his lab… I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this wondrous device presently.
that network operates on a definition of politics that is nearly indistinguishable from that of personality and celebrity. So much of the discussion is about individuals, about style, about posture more than policy. Incidents like Jackson’s death put it in harsh relief. They’ll be on this for days, turning it like a roast on a rotisserie… and they won’t be alone in that. It’s just the type of narrative our pop culture loves best: the mega-star, staggeringly popular yet strangely isolated, follows a long downward trajectory into a very public disintegration, then dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Elvis all over again. That and the myth of the young crash-and-burn star (e.g. Curt Cobain) are particular favorites. I’m sorry Jackson’s dead, but honestly… is he the only one today?
mansion to the hospital, one wonders how many Iraqis met their end as a result of the violence we ignited; how many Afghans were shaken down by a kleptocratic state run by warlords and fueled by international aid dollars; how many nameless detainees were beaten, starved, electrocuted, waterboarded, or worse in some third-world dungeon on the orders of a faceless bureaucrat. And those are only the fires we started; there are also those we merely profit from, like the continuing blood-letting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and elsewhere. (And yes, before you email, we did have something to do with putting the Congo in the state it’s in today, funding and directing a terrorist army in the sixties that secured the deranged Mobutu’s grip on power.) In short, there’s no such thing as a slow news day… and no day when it becomes any less important to talk about injustice the world over.