Barack Obama needed a war he could call his own. In Afghanistan, OB has found such a war. A meaty presence in Afghanistan has morphed into an all-out onslaught, with the attendant slaughter of innocence.
It wasn’t a daisy cutter of the Bush era, but a Himars rocket, an acronym for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, that killed at least 10 people, including 5 children, in Marja, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand Province, to where Obama has taken his war.
The place is dotted with rural villages and villagers, so some are bound to be incinerated by American bombs. So far nothing about BO’s shame in the op-ed pages of the LA Times or the NYT.
Most Americans may approve of BO’s pet war, but murder by majority approval is still murder. Those Afghans who died today are involuntary conscripts—they get to partake of the wonders of American democracy only indirectly: a mob (of Americans) in a far-away land decided their fate. And by golly what a splendid job this mob has done.
Update I: THE MIGHTY TALIBAN.
“I don’t think you can really describe them militarily. It seems like a few guys taking potshots … and not terribly effectively, with some exceptions.”
That’s NYTs correspondent ROD NORDLAND describing the Taliban on the PBS News Hour today.
His Boy Obama and his General get top marks for mercy killings. When Bush finished off civilians it wasn’t nearly as kindly as when McChrystal does it under the divine inspiration of BO:
Remember “the — the wedding, one of several, actually, that was bombed a year or two ago,”? … “the Bush administration, you know, they just — it took them months to ever admit they had even done anything wrong.”
Barack, by contrast, is positively killing these kids with kindness:
“They were so quick to announce that, in fact, that it turns out they exaggerated, apparently, the number of civilians they killed. It turned out it was actually only nine, and there were also three Taliban in the house who were shooting from the house, and thereby, at least arguably, making it a legitimate target.”
To listen to NORDLAND, you’d think that BO brought back from the dead three civilians thought dead.
In fairness to this correspondent, the NYT was all for the previous warbot’s war as well.
During Bush’s war, “Fox News was able to create the perception of a parallel universe in Iraq replete with big (nuclear) bangs and miraculously materializing al-Qaida terrorists because its Hollywood-inspired vision resonated with viewers. The ratings provided proof. By popular demand, MSNBC, CNN, and the New York Times (This means you, Judith Miller) adopted a similar faux patriotism devoid of skepticism and serenely accepting of every silly White House claim.”
Everything is as it is in the USA.
Update II (Feb. 16): Thanks you Van Wijk for reminding the errant folks that, as I put it, “Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one.”
Update III: I loathe rehashing arguments I’ve already won on this space many times over. Alas, this is the human condition.
Myron: Polls show a respectable percentage of Muslims condone Jihadi pursuits (search for some fresh data; I like those). If equaled by as many Jews and Christians, liberals and libertarians and elements on the American Right always helping to make the “Islamikazes'” case would protest as loud as you lot squealed over placing a bug in Abu Zubaydah’s cage. Hence the issue of fifth-column immigrants.
Back in 2005, “a leaked Whitehall dossier revealed that affluent, middle-class, British-born Muslims were signing up to Al-Qaida in droves. Translated into official speak by Timesonline, only ‘3,000 British-born or British-based people have passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.’
And if that doesn’t allay unwarranted fears, ‘Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.'”
In other words, 16,000 homicidal sleepers are loose in England!
These figures, of course, are statistically significant—stupendously so—given the barbarism they portend. Over this sort of astoundingly consequential number, our Myron is jumping for joy.
Such is the liberal mindset.
