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Afghanistan: Obama at the Precipice
THE most intriguing, and possibly most fateful, news of last week could not be found in the health care horse-trading in Congress, or in the international zoo at the United Nations, or in the Iran slapdown in Pittsburgh. It was an item tucked into a blog at ABCNews.com. George Stephanopoulos reported that the new "must-read book" for President Obama's war team is "Lessons in Disaster" by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.
Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein's book, drawn from Bundy's ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. "Lessons in Disaster" caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as "an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans." The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration.
Holbrooke's verdict on "Lessons in Disaster" was not only correct but more prescient than even he could have imagined. This book's intimate account of White House decision-making is almost literally being replayed in Washington (with Holbrooke himself as a principal actor) as the new president sets a course for the war in Afghanistan. The time for all Americans to catch up with this extraordinary cautionary tale is now.
Analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan are the rage these days. Some are wrong, inexact or speculative. We don't know whether Afghanistan would be a quagmire, let alone that it could remotely bulk up to the war in Vietnam, which, at its peak, involved 535,000 American troops. But what happened after L.B.J. Americanized the war in 1965 is Vietnam's apocalyptic climax. What's most relevant to our moment is the war's and Goldstein's first chapter, set in 1961. That's where we see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office.
The remarkable parallels to 2009 became clear last week, when the Obama administration's internal conflicts about Afghanistan spilled onto the front page. On Monday The Washington Post published Bob Woodward's account of a confidential assessment by the top United States and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, warning that there could be "mission failure" if more troops aren't added in the next 12 months. In Wednesday's Times White House officials implicitly pushed back against the leak of McChrystal's report by saying that the president is "exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan."
As Goldstein said to me last week, it's "eerie" how closely even these political maneuvers track those of a half-century ago, when J.F.K. was weighing whether to send combat troops to Vietnam. Military leaders lobbied for their new mission by planting leaks in the press. Kennedy fired back by authorizing his own leaks, which, like Obama's, indicated his reservations about whether American combat forces could turn a counterinsurgency strategy into a winnable war.
Within Kennedy's administration, most supported the Joint Chiefs' repeated call for combat troops, including the secretaries of defense (McNamara) and state (Dean Rusk) and Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the president's special military adviser. The highest-ranking dissenter was George Ball, the undersecretary of state. Mindful of the French folly in Vietnam, he predicted that "within five years we'll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again." In the current administration's internal Afghanistan debate, Goldstein observes, Joe Biden uncannily echoes Ball's dissenting role.
Though Kennedy was outnumbered in his own White House - and though he had once called Vietnam "the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia" - he ultimately refused to authorize combat troops. He instead limited America's military role to advisory missions. That policy, set in November 1961, would only be reversed, to tragic ends, after his death. As Bundy wrote in a memo that year, the new president had learned the hard way, from the Bay of Pigs disaster in April, that he "must second-guess even military plans." Or, as Goldstein crystallizes the overall lesson of J.F.K.'s lonely call on Vietnam strategy: "Counselors advise but presidents decide."
Obama finds himself at that same lonely decision point now. Though he came to the presidency declaring Afghanistan a "war of necessity," circumstances have since changed. While the Taliban thrives there, Al Qaeda's ground zero is next-door in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Last month's blatantly corrupt, and arguably stolen, Afghanistan election ended any pretense that Hamid Karzai is a credible counter to the Taliban or a legitimate partner for America in a counterinsurgency project of enormous risk and cost. Indeed, Karzai, whose brother is a reputed narcotics trafficker, is a double for Ngo Dinh Diem, the corrupt South Vietnamese president whose brother also presided over a vast, government-sanctioned criminal enterprise in the early 1960s. And unlike Kennedy, whose C.I.A. helped take out the Diem brothers, Obama doesn't have a coup in his toolbox.
Goldstein points out there are other indisputable then-and-now analogies as well. Much as Vietnam could not be secured over the centuries by China, France, Japan or the United States, so Afghanistan has been a notorious graveyard for the ambitions of Alexander the Great, the British and the Soviets. "Some states in world politics are simply not susceptible to intervention by the great powers," Goldstein told me. He also notes that the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Vietnam share the same geographical advantage. As the porous border of neighboring North Vietnam provided sanctuary and facilitated support to our enemy then, so Pakistan serves our enemy today.
Most worrisome, in Goldstein's view, is the notion that a recycling of America's failed "clear and hold" strategy in Vietnam could work in Afghanistan. How can American forces protect the population, let alone help build a functioning nation, in a tribal narco-state consisting of some 40,000 mostly rural villages over an area larger than California and New York combined?
Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state? How would a Taliban-free Afghanistan stop a jihadist trained in Pakistan's Qaeda camps from mounting a terrorist plot in Denver and Queens?
Already hawks are arguing that any deviation from McChrystal's combat-troop requests is tantamount to surrender and "immediate withdrawal." But that all-in or all-out argument, a fixture of the Iraq debate, is just as false a choice here. Obama is not contemplating either surrender to terrorists or withdrawal from Afghanistan. One prime alternative is the counterterrorism plan championed by Biden. As The Times reported, it would scale back American forces in Afghanistan to "focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan."
Obama's decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and political courage he can muster. If he adds combat troops, he'll be extending a deteriorating eight-year-long war without a majority of his country or his own party behind him. He'll have to explain why more American lives should be yoked to the Karzai "government." He'll have to be honest in estimating the cost. (The Iraq war, which the Bush administration priced at $50 to $60 billion, is at roughly $1 trillion and counting.) He will have to finally ask recession-battered Americans what his predecessor never did: How much - and what - are you willing to sacrifice in blood and treasure for the mission?
If Obama instead decides to embrace some variation on the Biden option, he'll have a different challenge. He'll face even more violent attacks than he did this summer. When George Will wrote a recent column titled "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan," he was accused of "urging retreat and accepting defeat" (by William Kristol) and of "waving the bloody shirt" (by Fred Kagan, an official adviser to McChrystal who, incredibly enough, freelances as a blogger at National Review). The editorial page at Will's home paper, The Washington Post, declared that deviating from McChrystal's demand for more troops "would both dishonor and endanger this country." If a conservative columnist can provoke neocon invective this hysterical, just imagine what will be hurled at Obama.
But the author of "Lessons in Disaster" does not believe that a change in course in Afghanistan would be a disaster for Obama's young presidency. "His greatest qualities as president," Goldstein says, "are his quality of mind and his quality of judgment - his dispassionate ability to analyze a situation. If he was able to do that here, he might more than survive a short-term hit from the military and right-wing pundits. He would establish his credibility as a president who will override his advisers when a strategy doesn't make sense."
Either way, it's up to the president to decide what he thinks is right for the country's security, the politics be damned. That he has temporarily pressed the pause button to think it through while others, including some of his own generals, try to lock him in is not a sign of indecisiveness but of confidence and strength. It is, perhaps, Obama's most significant down payment yet on being, in the most patriotic sense, Kennedyesque.
47 Comments so far
Show AllIf this President has any guts, any leadership at all (which I doubt) he will choose the wise course and disengage in Afganistan.
The American people already stand against this war with fine young men and women dying for nothing, day by day as this President dilly-dallies trying to put off as decision. Its far different than sitting around the lounge and talking with no lives riding on your silly rhetoric and inane, unrealistic conclusions.
Better a bad leader than no leader at all.
you are right Henry8 . JUST GET OUT OF THERE> STOP this Imperialism . PERIOD.
but obama is trapped by the Empire.
we can just hope that he , contrary to all signs, finds the courage to BE who he ought to be : a leader for peace, for justice, for truth.
and then maybe, america can FINALLY "move on" as HE said. -- towards what it COULD have been but hasn't.
You are correct but I can't see it happening. Competing America can never "lose". He won't want to be seen as letting the troops have perished in vain or being soft on terror. It becomes a self-sustaining feedback loop.
Rich's article emphasizes how little USAan's contemplate the harm they are doing and how their concerns are only for themselves.
The Taliban were not our enemy we attacked them without justification. The USA has never even claimed that the Taliban had prior knowledge of 9/11 ( no matter who perpetrated 9/11). And the Taliban were negotiating Bin Laden's extradition when the USA attacked.
To describe Afghanistan as a narcostate is to demonize it. I assume the majority of farmers do not grow opium.
Opum production was almost eradicated under the Taliban in cooperation with the USA and UN.
There is Heroin production in Afghanistan now because the USA allows the chemical tankers carrying the precursors to openly travel the Kyber pass.
And please not the argument that the Neocons will kill Obama and his family if they do not cooperate with the MIC. His life is not worth more than an Afghan or Pakistani child. And if he can not even protect his own person, he is powerless and can do little good.
Thanks for a bit of sanity in this wacky world.
It's not so much "USAians" who are criminally self-centered, it's the corporatocracy. War is profitable for business and industry, and corporatocrats are conscienceless. It's not they who pay any part of the price, they just reap the profits. So for them there's no downside.
Smedley Butler had it right: any time troops are sent abroad to fight, all the corporate officers in every industry that will profit from the war need to be on the first boat, in fatigues and carrying a rifle, ranked and paid as Privates [which would be peculiarly appropriate, really, considering how many of them are dicks by nature].
The prospect of them having to risk their very own personal lives as though they were some no-account prole is the only thing that will stop the crimes against peace and humanity.
I don't think Obama is dilly dallying on sending more troops to Afghanistan as much as he is doing a dollar search on how much he stands to profit from the herion coming out of Afghanistan. If he sends another 100,000 troops to oversee the poppy fields, that could be a potential million or so for him. 500,000 troops could translate into 5 million in his ever expanding bank account. But then again, the oil pipeline needs some coverage, that dumb expression on his face (that reminds me so much of W) suggests that he is torn between sending troops to mind the poppy fields or the oil??
Don't "eff" with the poppy fields! That there's some CIA shi* !! "Black Special Ops" funding, you understand? All for your own good and all...
As usual, the "Lessons in Disaster" are all about the possibilities for U.S. "mission failure" and whether the results might be a "quagmire" for U.S. troops. Issues about the legitimacy and true purposes of the mission itself never seem to enter into the discussion. And, of course, the consequences for non-American victims have absolutely no relevance whatever.
Amazing, is it not, how what used to be known as brave and patriotic resistance to invading foreign armies of occupation is reclassified as "insurgency" whenever the invaders are American.
And the members of the "insurgency," when captured, are called "enemy combattants" and tossed into a black hole where they are tortured and quite often killed for funsies by our brave men. Sort of like what happened to the European resistance in WW2. Of course that was different: the Nazis were nasty.
Wouldn't the Viet Cong be a group of 'enemy combatants'? Or did the black pyjamas constitute an 'enemy uniform'? Did the VC have Geneva Accord/Protocols protections? It is such a tired pattern that it has become banal. The U.S. invades. (There is always a 'good' reason.) An insurgency develops. Who knew? Who could have predicted that? This means that yet more U.S. troops are needed. The 'insurgency' effort increases to match the U.S. increased forces. So yet more forces are needed to fight a 'growing insurgency'... ad infinitum... IT IS ALWAYS THE SAME OLD STORY... like I said, it has just become SO banal... you know? The presence of the U.S. on the world stage has just become so tiresome...
The 'same old story' goes back to 1899 with the Philippine-American War,with the Filipino's none too happy that their long struggle against the Spanish colonizers was merely transferred to a new struggle against the Americans, who "bought" the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam, from the Spanish for $20 million.
The Filipinos struggled against the Americans until 1913, and lost 1.5 million people. The original 'torture of gooks' began in the jungles of the Philippines, and you can be sure the Americans were not gentle with these 'ungrateful bastards' before any hint of Geneva Conventions, or honorable journalists covering Wars, or TV cameras. Anything that ignorant, violent 20-somethings might think of to "break the spirit" of their "insurgent enemies" was tried, you can be sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine-American_War
An early anti-war activist was Mark Twain, of the Anti-Imperialist League, who was against Americans conquering and annexing other lands:
I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
--—Mark Twain, New York Herald, Oct. 15, 1900.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Imperialist_League
..."the president is 'exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan.'"
That's weak. It would take one speech to admit the policy was wrong, and start removing the troops.
That's right. GET OUT NOW. And stop the insane drone attacks on Pakistan. Blatantly aggressive military tauntings are self- destructive in the extreme. If any action is needed to head off terrorists, it would be behind the scenes intel and police type work by the CIA and similar international organizations.
Amen!
That was what I was going to post until I read your post.
"Rich is framing the current juncture as a "choice," but it's not a choice between escalating vs. curtailing US aggression. It's simply a choice in which country, Afghanistan versus Pakistan, we should first focus our aggression." –(RichM)
–Precisely.
Frank Rich writes for the New York Times. Even when he writes an occasionally strong column –as he has indeed done on the 'bailout travesty' –it is couched and predicated on tightly circumscribed dictums from which he cannot stray and certainly not exceed.
When it comes to the continuance of American military aggression, it is never a choice of 'if,' only when and where.
Or even more to the point is: "Where else?"
The aggression itself is an ipso facto given.
Iran and Venezuela await.
–(Jill Bains)
excellent analysis. couldn't agree more. i have a hard time reading anything published in the NYT.
RichM, do you have a collection of blog posts somewhere? good stuff.
This discussion of "Winning" is an intentional misdirect from our Ministry of Propaganda.
There will be no glorious moment when Americans pump their collective fists in the air and dance a jig when some impossible unknown is achieved.
There will be no victory for anyone other than military contractors, the bankers who finance them and the media who provides verbal cover.
Help. That final paragraph, once again kissing the Saint's butt, forced me to reach for the Pepto. Imagine all the Goose-stepping, Cruise Missile Liberals picking up their copies of the Times with their lox, bagels and hot house tomatoes, rushing back to their doorman apartments to gush over this one. Not a mention here that Obama has already doubled the forces, tripled the drone attacks, bullied and humiliated Muslims in multiple countries, conflated Al Queda and the Taliban to make a case for "a war of necessity" (a criminal act known as murder when sending citizens into harms way based on intentional lies) and that the generals that are pressuring our poor hapless Preppy are the generals of his own choosing. This is the sort of pandering rubbish that this great ass of a columnist is shoveling up to his version of the masses, that is employing his third rate Upper West Side group think PC intelligence to secretly protect and extol warmongering elitists in order to protect his own cozy, elitist pedestal. Imagine this fool parading around Manhattan, stroking his ego with the praise of the very rich of which he is one, while the inner city Black fires Hellfire missiles at the invisible poor just prior to stepping on a road side bomb. Let's see if this gutless wonder ever writes a column calling for a draft. Watch his crowd of sycophants turn on him with pitch forks and drive him off out of his plush little nest built on some of the priciest real estate in the world. The Cruise Missile Liberals shall never send their own offspring off to the Great Preppy's "war of necessity."
How can one even talk of winning when an innocent seven-year-old Afghan girl had her entire family torn to shreds by a bomb and can't stop crying?
http://www.alternet.org/world/142857/one_year_after_her_family_died_
in_u.s._airstrike%2C_seven-year-old_afghan_girl_lives_in_constant_fear/
Excellent post!
Very sad, though!
You're either a Corporatist Warmonger or you're Not!
Barack O'Busha is an outstanding Corporatist Warmonger!
Obama's decision, whichever it is, will demand all the wisdom and political courage he can muster.
Obama is in the White House not because of his wisdom and political courage but because of his stupidity and political cowardice both of which have been amply demonstrated over and over again these last nine months.
The United States is owned lock, stock and whiskey barrel by the MIC and what is loosely termed "Wall Street". The MIC wants to plunge ever deeper into Afghanistan because they love war. War is what gives their shallow, empty lives any meaning at all. Wall Street wants it because there are piles and piles of cash to be made. Obama is just the latest bank teller we call the President of the United States.
>>Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two, after countless casualties and billions of dollars, how would that stop Al Qaeda from coalescing in Somalia or some other criminal host state? How would a Taliban-free Afghanistan stop a jihadist trained in Pakistan's Qaeda camps from mounting a terrorist plot in Denver and Queens
I am just bothered by this whole spiel. As the BBC reported Al Qaeda is a myth created by the west to sell the war.
Furthermore what exactly IS a Criminal host state? What makes a Somalia or an Afghanistan under the Taliban a "Criminal State" ?
Would Venezuala fall into this Category?
A CRIMINAL state would by definition be a state that continually breaks International laws. As far as i can see the USA and Israel fall into this category. Somalia and Afghanistan do not.
Last paragraph ,excellent conclusion.
Bring America Back !!!!
***Team Obama had, and may still have , a once in a lifetime golden opportunity !!!
***When Obama learned, three weeks ago, that his boots on the ground General McChrystal had not one idea of what to do in Afghan, the lightbulb should have gone on !!
Obama should have immediately Declared Victory in both Iraq and Afghan, Ordered all Troops withdrawn, except for Final Security==and bring our troops home !!!
Team Obama would have instantly become American Idols, and his campaign promise to END the War would be fulfilled !
He might also have gotten a 2nd term in Office.
But NO, there is some kind of intermission in play--do not yet tell the Prez you need another half mil of our guys.
Then, who comes on screen but a proven war criminal named Robert Gates, Sec Def, Bush lockstep Neocon smooth mouthing how we could continue in Afghan,
Then, who comes in play ===AFTER EIGHT LONG YEARS==but the fabled, incompetent FBI, with long hatched plots by Muslims long lived within our own borders. Such heros they are , having infiltrated those nasty Homegrown tomatoes, er, or Terrorists Plots, just in time for renewal of the Patriot Act, and just in time for a decision point in Afghan !!
Never mind that the US Dept of State has been letting these Muslims and foreign nationals into our Nation for decades, then forgetting to track if they ever went back home !! And, that's how these birds got to be Homegrown, green thumbs. !
It is almost time for another recorded Aljazeera message from Boogieman bin Laden telling us he hates our freedoms !
What this really is, is our good old MI Complex hard at work and justifying in Mainstream Media to clamor for more billions of Taxpayer $$$$$$$$$$$ for WAR !!!!
Just where were the hero boys and girls of the FBI 8 years ago when they ignored direct evidence of the 9/11 Attacks ???
Ask Colleen Rowley perhaps, who testified against the present FBI Director Robert MUeller before Congress !!
Ask Sibel Edwards ! Ask a certain Air Force General about
Project Able-Danger.
.........and did you notice when Homegrown Terror Boy clicked to set off the bomb==it didn't go off==whew==all because those quasi-vigilent FBI Dick Traceys were right there to foil the plot ...did you notice that ????
The war mongers are right there doing it again, and oops,
here comes that Iran guy again, tantalizing the mainstream media again with those ghost WMDs--you know--all those nukes!
It would be inconceivable that an American President would come out against more troops for Afghanistan. That is preposterous.
Why the sickening pretense? Is it that Americans are 'cool' with a thousand fold expansion of more Predator drones, rather than actual fascist soldiers? Is that not a rhetorical question or what?
America is now ONLY about permanent war and little else. It is an intractable trope which now plays itself out on a 'meta' level. It subsumes and overrides anything else which can be said about the nation; it imposes a 'dominant' definition.
America is now materially and ideationally totalized in war and war alone; this demiurge exists outside of variances of political will and seems to metastasize almost organically, as if had a life of its own. 98% of the populace could be polled to say they support ending the Afghanistan catastrophe, yet the savagery would continue unabated. That is not even worthy of conjectural analysis anymore; it is not inscrutable, but tacit.
Frank Rich's article is so filled with textbook examples of American liberalism's imperialist pieties and nostrums it short circuits the mind's eye and leaves only psychic dread.
Only when the acrid flames and smoke on the far horizon signal the destruction of the odious death camp called Bagram U.S. Air Force Base, can it be said that 'real' progress is being made in Afghanistan.
This much to wished for event would be similar to the joy millions of the world's peoples felt when the fascist American helicopters were absconding from the rooftops in Saigon, at the end of the Vietnam war: The liberating North Vietnamese Army had come to reclaim its nation from imperialism and its fleeing collaborators.
Similar to the now classic 'non-withdrawal' from Iraq, there would be MORE troops for Afghanistan even if Obama went on TV to claim he was withdrawing 90,000 troops!
That circus travels by night. –(Jill Bains)
Sioux Rose
AMFORTAS: Great post, well & wisely-articulated. I often scale it down to 2 words (appropos to America and its alleged leaders' policies today): MARS RULES. You provided the class-A, far more nuanced version.
Sioux Rose,
Your generosity is always welcome. I only wish I were not so overwhelmed with dread and disgust so I could not be more optimistic.
Posters such as 'metal 'and a few others, despite my reservations with their arguments, do succeed in articulating concrete programs; that they continue to articulate their proscriptions within what I feel is a throughly discredited institutional reality is besides the point.
Courageously fighting off bad faith– even perhaps against what they know to be true – I find an admirable quality. They refuse to submit to a fashionable pessimism.
Having the ability to conduct an inner 'dialectic' with themselves is the mark of a maturing, 'living' thinking– honing itself in struggle, and trying to reconcile abstruse contradictions. I am happy to include you in that circle of commentators I find worth reading.
"Two steps forward, one step back.. " And so it goes.
That I see little light in the darkness, does not mean that radiance will not emerge over the next set of traversed mountains.
Same struggle different front.
All the disparate voices here remind me of the panoramic way Andre Malraux treated some of his characters in his novel. "Man's Fate" about the great Shanghai uprising of 1927. For example the character, Chen.
Premonitions of an even greater tragedy only intensify the desire to annex the future for the beginning of the human project.
–(Jill Bains)
Sioux Rose
JILL: It's very generous given your time constraints that you contribute as readily as you do to this forum. I wonder if some that attack do so because they feel threatened by thinkers? I would even go so far as to say there could be a hint of sexism in some of the attacks. It's always intrigued me that authoritarians could be found on the left, or among those who profess to be progressive in their orientation. Regardless of the anointed designation, they still see fit to narrow the discourse, punish those that don't conform to the parameters of their specific worldview. Interesting, indeed.
As for the moral play between light and dark, or perhaps even THE light and the corresponding darkness, human nature is set between these poles as much as the planet itself spins in an orb set between Venus and Mars. As a college English major, we were taught to analyze the symbolic elements woven through great literary plots. I put this skill to work observing the great "play" of life, and often find powerful symbolic areas of resonance. Given the limitations of Western academe with its intense focus on a "separation of disciplines," some minds (not to mention literary agents I have come upon) have difficulty connecting the dots. When anyone makes such allusions that span a number of categories in their view this form of analysis constitutes a form of heresy! Many times in this forum I have elaborated at length on the relative influences of Venus and Mars as taken both from mythology and astrology. I believe the respective energetic trends associated with these planets connote our capacities for naked self-interest versus respect for the "greater good." Some refer to the same dynamic in terms of the "dominator" society versus the nurturant one, while yet others prefer to cast the same debate through the lens of psycho-analytic terminology.
Ultimately each of us wrestles between these polar drives as do entire societies. The Ancient Tarot speaks of the conundrum that faces everyman and everywoman in its depiction of those steps to higher consciousness demarcated by the 22 cards that comprise the major Arcana. This Oracle is profound and speaks to unchanging elements of human nature. I find much truth there, as well.
As always, I look forward to your responses, and my dictionary is standing by! Your use of language is a creative challenge that I genuinely appreciate!
Decent bunch of 'vocabulary' words. But the analysis isn't worth a shit.
How's that pretentious novel coming along?
(I see that Rose-by-whatever-name likes your set of words. Small minds...)
My "vocabulary", obviously not yours. Get a bigger vocabulary. So you can learn to read and to understand.
All you do is admit your stupidity.
The words are in the dictionary. That you are incapable of understanding them is your problem alone. Look them up. You might end up agreeing with me..
"Analysis?" I'm not interested in 'analysis.' That is for pedants.
Cutting to the chase, I try to speak the truth as I see it. Others on this blog provide superior contextual analysis far better than I ever could. I leave that discipline to their field of expertise. We all play to our strong suits.
I do summary judgments.
Sioux Rose does not claim she likes my "set of words" or the "vocabulary" I use.
She responds to the truths as she sees them in what I say. They resonate with the way she sees and feel things. That's fairly simple.
My novel? I don't write novels, I am a medical doctor and a performing musician, but there is a reason why Malcolm Lowry's "UnderThe Volcano" is considered a peculiar masterpiece. Some say it reminds them of Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo," not without reason.
I could give a flying fuck what you think about much of anything. –(Jill Bans)
You have to "analyze" something before you can "judge" it. If you want to make a sound judgment.
I must assure you, I do 'analyze' things and do so throughly. That is why my 'judgements,' I believe, are sound. That I see fit not to produce reams of supportive 'analysis' does not render my judgements pulled 'out of a hat.'
I just see no point of subjecting other readers to a mass of exegetical analysis on a public blog more appropriate to 'opinion' than labored dissertations. Other posters are adept at marshaling supportive 'facts.' I want to avoid redundancy.
One has to assume a certain prior knowledge out of respect for the general reader. I do that. I don't 'baby' others along and hold their hands, as you seem to require. I try to provide 'the water,' not lead you to it.
My approach is synthetic in both look and feel. If my 'summaries' sometimes miss the mark in your eyes, I assure you–it is not for lack of prior 'analysis.'
I do not aim to convince or argue, but only have people 'recognize' something as being true. Sometimes I am successful. You remain free to do as you like with what you find. –(Jill Bains)
Being eloquent is not a short coming. Amafortas's words do ring true.
Thanks Glenn! –(Jill B.)
"Even if we routed the Taliban in another decade or two..."
____________________________________
Rich is using the word "routed" in the sense of "defeated", of course, but "routed" in the sense of "gave directions to" is arguably a more accurate description of the facts.
The US hegemony has been "routing" guerrilla insurgencies to and fro in the "Af-Pak" theater of operations since Brezinski effected CIA assistance to Afghan mujahideen during the Carter administration.
US political leaders then "routed", i.e. spun, the Taliban and its bastard stepchild, the al-Qaeda Phantom Menace, into its present demonized state.
The military kick-ass "routing"-- accomplished by massacring mostly civilians with automated weapons, hooray for our side-- is just for show; it's camouflage for the political machinations.
In either sense of the term, it's all about the "routing".
· Yr Obd't Servant
I sent the following to the local newspaper, the Harrisburg, PA, Patriot-News:
A long and terrible period in history began with World Wars One and Two, and has continued, unabated, around the world without end, with the "allied victors" attempting to continue their colonial exploitation under other names, such as "spreading democracy" (by overthrowing democratically elected governments and installing favored dictators) and "providing stability" (by stationing American troops in as many resource-rich foreign countries as will allow it, while remaining the world's largest exporter of military weapons) and "stopping terrorism" (by bombing innocent civilians in U.S.-occupied countries while bringing them democracy and stability) -- all of which are direct causes of the proliferation of terrorism.
How long is this period in history going to last? You are paying for it, with interest on funds borrowed world-wide. This is why your government cannot afford to provide a single-payer universal health care coverage program for your family. How much longer will our creditors continue to lend? Do they really think we have the ability to repay eleven trillion dollars? Twenty trillion? How about Thirty trillion? Or is it their intent to lend us into financial collapse and oblivion so severe that we will have little choice but to disband the empire and bring the troops home?
Just another sickening aspect of the 'new' criminally driven U.S.A. and to think of o at the precipice is just a line of bull as o was placed in office for certain considerations of which the permanant war is one of the main features and the financial terrorist attack on our economy(say grand larceny)is another, to keep less of the 1% who have 95% of the wealth over the rest of the country, the main beneficiaries where o is allowed to be 'president' of the U.S.A.
I kinda believe o may not, without permission, use nukes, but you can bet he will provide the 500K troops that traitor mccrystal is demanding which is quite a turnaround from the invasion of iraq where troop levels supposedly didn't exceed 200k, not counting the private contractors, but here we go to the full scale military onslaught that will produce what was once Viet Nam, a mission to be sustained, not won.
If the people can't get the government and military back under control, then we will never get our country back from the evil traitors using the major resources of what is left of america for their personal, private, political and financial gain and that is what this whole deal is about 'gain' mostly financial because they found they could just go in and take it, steal it, grand larceny.
mordechai, I usually agree with you but you are skirting the issue. The Zionists who control Amerika's foreign policy demand that the USA fight Moslems to cover their tracks in Palestine. The elimination of the Palestinians and annexation of the land has been the goal for 60 yrs. The new Warsaw ghetto is Gaza and Iran must be cast as the new villain. The ridiculous canard that Iran would ever think of launching a missle at the Western World is preposterous., immediate annihilation would follow and Iran knows this very well. Meanwhile there is not a word spoken about the nuclear warheads in Israel. Until the ruth of 911 is revealed, don't hold your breath, the neocon murderers will use this false flag to whip up the sheeple. Expect another attack soon to refresh the idiocy of the masses.
The United States' crusade in the Middle East no longer has an overtly religious or apocalyptic tone, now that George Wanker Bush no longer rules. Obama does not believe in Armageddon. Obama believes in Obama and Obama's reelection. Therefore, he believes in Israel and Zionism because Israel is America's proctologist. It is the only nation on earth that can look up our asshole and claim it sees a field of sunflowers blowing gently in the wind. Most of the rest of the world sees shit and polyps.
An excellent comment and brutally explicit.
It is almost impossible to overstate how inimical America's 'mirroring' relationship with Israel really is.
I would further refine your comment to say that what the world sees even before "the shit and polyps," are rivers of blood.
America and Israel, the Gemini twins of state terror.
–(Jill Bains)
Conservatives went through a lot of trouble to start these profitable wars. They will cry waaaaaah...!! if we leave. Obama must soothe them with money and blood if he wants to get re-elected.
"Lessons in Disaster" - I thought that Ronald Raygun had perfected disaster with the Neo-Cons.
Ahoy old timers. Do you remember the old trick we used to play called "right ball left ball", well that's what the Zionists have our government playing in a geopolitical sense. The game goes like this two people are in on it--they simply position themselves on the right and left side of the victim--then one says, "Right ball", the other says, "Left ball"--then they both chant, "So who's the prick in the middle?"
Please take out a map of the Middle East, notice who is in the middle in this game--it is that Jew-hating, Holocaust denying thorn in the flesh Iran--notice what other nation has a land connection on the south east side at the bottom. I seriously believe that when we have enough troops on both sides the US will be given orders by Israel to attack--they really want that prick, the oil and the revenge--if you want to see how dangerous the president of that nation is, please compare his UN speech to that of his enemies--and reflect on what they say and more importantly DO--give it some real thought and then you decide who the real threat is in the Middle East--thank you for your time.
It;s not a matter of can the US war machine win a war in Afghanistan, though it can't, it's a matter of what Norman Solomon talked about in hIs documentary of why we should be in this or any war, and why the government as Wayne Morse talked about during that time "aren't being given the facts for them, not the president to make our foreign policy and make it in a way that keeps out of wars we shouldn;t damn be in. Yes, and the name of that documentary is "War Made Easy." Watch that and it will give you an understanding of the media play a role in getting us into wars and other military actions since the Second World War. Somehow as Marin Luther King Jr said "This madness must end," not because our side might not win, but because it's damn wrong. It's wrong for us to dominate people, to keep as part of our empire while lying about calling this a fight for democracy and so much other damn BS. We';re being fed a pack of lies to defend the indefensible. If we want democracy for these people, we'll damn let them run their own affairs.
This country fought against British imperialism, as Dr King pointed out as part of a revolution, how ironic it is now that as he pointed we and the rest of West have become such a "anti revolutionary" force putting ourselves especially the USA on the wrong side of history. What we are doing as Dr King pointed out in attacking the Vietnam War is "unjust."
As he also made the point, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." To oppose this kind military adventure is as right as it was in Dr King's day. Killing huge numbers of these people simply seeking to control their own destiny is just damn plain wrong. When we do it, we follow in the footsteps of the Nazis as Dr King pointed in that same talk about us testing out our modern weapons on them. These are he said are "children of God" just as we are, are and that's why he spoke out for them and against US Government war mongering and imperialism in his day, not because the US side might lose. Dr King did not use the word "Nazis," directly by referring to the German war machine in the Second World War, that's indirectly how it comes out. Nor do I seek to force my or his religion on anyone else, but he sure tried to walk the walk of his religion in the social gospel context, and that's what really counts even with the FBI doing all it could to sabotage him and with the US mainstream media attacking all out for speaking so much truth to power.
The corrupt war mongering, imperialist US power elites must not be allowed to carry out this morally bankrupt foreign policy if we're to have any decent ethical standing in the community of the civilized nations of this world.
Those who fought for the USA in the Second World War fought against the very ideas that this policy represents. We in the anti war movement are patriots in highest sense of that word as we seek to put what is wrong with our country right.
AD