Tag Archives: war

Political Rants

Peace out.

Our entire political class is on fire to cut costs. Got a suggestion: shut down these useless wars. Yet another guy from my area has been killed in Afghanistan, fighting a war no one can justify. He’s got a wife and two kids, with a third on the way. Just one of the thousands. I see the procession of portraits every week on the PBS News Hour, as do many of my fellow Americans, sitting safe and dry in our living rooms, shaking our heads and muttering as we switch the channel to, I don’t know, Jersey Shore or some other shit. I know it’s hard to care when you don’t have any blood on the front line, but seriously – this war is simply wasting people… good people.

I don’t get choked up very often listening to NPR, but I heard a story on Memorial Day weekend that did it – about the father of a soldier killed in Iraq, talking about how he’d planted sunflowers near his son’s gravestone because the young man liked them so much, and how the father went to Iraq and saw his son, he claims, and the apparition asked him what the f**k he was doing there, told him he should go home, and said that it was all right, he was in a better place. We’re on year ten of stories like this. Jesus! Time to shut it down.

Weiner and losers. Don’t know about you, but I’ve seen people in more revealing shorts strolling by on the sidewalk. The media is in full frenzy mode over this bogus Anthony Weiner “scandal”. You’d think by now the name Breitbart might give them pause, but no. Note to corporate media: For chrissake, people… the man’s a newlywed, okay? Do I have to draw you a picture? There’s really nothing newsworthy here. Cover something important for once. And by that I don’t mean Sarah Palin’s bus tour, or Trump at an Applebee’s.

Hey… somebody roll a big aluminum foil wad out on to the front lawn; maybe that’ll break their trance-like gaze. Or just wake me when they get bored with it and decide to go back to doing something that resembles journalism.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Last resort.

Bin Laden has been found. Why doesn’t it surprise me that he was living in a luxurious gated community, not a cave? Used to better things, I suspect. Given the history of his involvement with the Afghan-Pakistani-American covert war against the Soviets in the 1980s, it is also unsurprising that he would make his home in the heart of perhaps the most militarized garrison town in Pakistan – a place literally crawling with ISI operatives, no doubt. It is simply inconceivable that at least some elements of the Pakistani military and/or intelligence services were not aware of his presence. (One wonders what the reaction might have been had he been discovered in a highly fortified mansion in a garrison village just outside of Damascus or Teheran.) 

The interpersonal connections between ISI and networks like Al Qaeda were built up over the course of decades. How else could such a notorious terror leader hide in plain sight, except by the same kind of tolerance shown to killers like Jose Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch?

Okay, so… that’s done. Now, when do we accord justice to those guys who used our military to destroy Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people? I’m not suggesting execution, of course, but a trip to the Hague might discourage copy-cat criminals. I’m just saying.

Then there’s the question of killing Bin Laden’s brainchild, the bottomless Afghan war. Let us face it, getting stuck in Afghanistan is precisely what he wanted us to do. This is not guess work – he said it numerous times. (Rachel Maddow’s recent pieces on this have been pretty solid.) Bin Laden drew satisfaction from the fact that he had helped bleed the Soviet Union dry by supporting the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s. That wasn’t the first empire battered by such an adventure. He was confident that we would destroy ourselves with an open-ended commitment there. (Iraq was just a bonus coup-de-grace we administered to ourselves.)

The fact is, I can already hear Bin Laden cackling from his watery grave as we expend more lives and treasure on the fool’s errand that is the Afghan war, drawing funds from vital health care, education, public works – you name it.  It’s time that enterprise received what he got, before it finishes us.

Political Rants

Creeping terror.

This hasn’t been a good week for the Libya enterprise, despite all that has been said and done to push it along in the right direction. Seems like mission creep is taking hold a lot faster than anyone might have guessed possible. It’s been reported that Obama has signed off on a finding to provide arms to the Libyan rebels and that C.I.A. operatives are on the ground and active in support of those forces. No surprise that the C.I.A. is there (it’s the rare nation that has never been the dubious beneficiary of Agency visitors, either invited or not). But that we would learn about it a little more than one week into this campaign is curious. And the word is that they have brought in close air support, including A-10 Warthogs and the like.  

A report by Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman on NPR’s Morning Edition was perhaps unintentionally illustrative of how badly this can go wrong:

“If their defeat is to be prevented, it’s inevitable that they get weapons from somewhere else,” says Frank Anderson, president of the Middle East Policy Council, a nonpartisan think tank. In the 1980s, he worked with the CIA, training Afghan rebels to fight the Soviets.

So… how did that Afghan thing turn out, anyhow? We are talking about a force that has no training, little leadership, few weapons, and no strategic resources to draw upon. Our operatives would effectively need to be their arms and legs, telling them where to move and when to shoot. That sounds, at best, like a formula for perpetual civil war and a divided Libya. However much I sympathize with Gaddafi’s opponents, I honestly don’t see how they can defeat an organized force. I’m not saying it’s not possible – just unlikely, even with an assist from the Agency. So…. what the hell are we doing?

The trouble with Obama’s splendid little war is that, if we were going to save the people of Benghazi by establishing a no-fly zone, we should have simply done so and gone no further. The outcome would not have been ideal – it will not be no matter what we do at this point. But trudging into yet another war is a patently bad idea for this country. If we had a draft (or a requirement that taxes be raised to cover every new conflict), this would never have even begun.

luv u,

jp