Category Archives: War

Old Blights (Afghanistan) And New (Barack)

Barack Obama, Bush, History, Homeland Security, Propaganda, Terrorism, The West, War

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “Old Blights (Afghanistan) And New (Barack)”:

“So far, the Left’s Prince of Peace has beefed-up Bush-era troop levels to 68,000, and is giving a good deal of thought to further deepening American involvement in the Afghan theater. The recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (now that provided some comedic relief) has managed to also sustain his predecessor’s efforts in Baghdad, where streets are slick with fresh blood.

As Dr. Johnson said, ‘There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.’ Neoconservative (Bush) or Progressive (Barack): louse or flea—a pest is still a pest.

It’s hard to tell whether B.O. believes his own the blather. Nevertheless, the president has expressed a talismanic faith that if he solves Afghanistan, he’ll solve terrorism …”

Read the rest, here.

Miss the weekly column on WND.COM? Be sure to catch it on Taki’s Magazine on the weekend.

Update II: War President (EIGHT MORE)

Barack Obama, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Republicans, War

When it comes to the wastrel wars the US is waging, there are few difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. If cleavages do exist, they are a matter of degree; John Kerry favors “a modest increase in U.S. troops”; The Other John is for a “huge surge.” You’d think that the always-opportunistic Republicans would see an opportunity to open up a lead by forging a new foreign policy. For as their economic fortunes have turned, so too have the American people turned against the wars in a big way.

But when Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity speak of a strong national defense, they are down with the party that wants to linger in places where Americans are unwanted (sometimes called nation-building): The Democrats.

Yesterday, there was a “bloodbath in Baghdad”: “Two car bombs turned Baghdad into a killing field on Sunday October 25th, claiming the lives of at least 155 people and injuring hundreds more.”

Today, reports the AP, Kabul was the scene of a helicopter crash that killed 14 Americans — 11 troops and three Drug Enforcement Administration agents, “in the deadliest day for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in more than four years.”

So far BO, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has sustained Bush’s efforts in both theaters, while giving a good deal of thought to accelerating them.

Update I (Oct. 27): AP: As OB dithers—but not in the way the colossal Dick Cheney meant it—“Eight [more] American troops were killed in two separate insurgent attacks Tuesday in southern Afghanistan”:

The military issued a statement saying the deaths occurred during “multiple, complex” bomb strikes. It said several troops were wounded and evacuated to a nearby medical facility, but gave no other details.

Capt. Adam Weece, a spokesman for American forces in the south, said both attacks occurred in Kandahar province. In Washington, a U.S. defense official said at least one was followed by an intense firefight with insurgents who attacked after an initial bomb went off. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to release the information.

The deaths bring to 55 the total number of American troops killed in October in Afghanistan.

Update II: Matthew Hoh, “a former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq,” writes the WaPo, has become “the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.”

I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.

[SNIP]

Whereas a Republican administration would have opted to smear this principled fellow—as it did Scott Ritter, the 12-year Marine Corps and gulf-war veteran who opposed the rabid attack on Iraq—the Obama overlords have tried to co-opt him; bribe him with career inducements. U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry “offered him a job on his senior embassy staff.” Richard C. Holbrooke, “the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan, … asked Hoh to join his team in Washington.”

“Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later:

many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there — a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. … the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.

Ritter rising.

Palin/Bachmann Endorse Doug Hoffman

Elections, Iraq, Political Philosophy, Politics, Republicans, Sarah Palin, War

Before you boo, and insist that sitting on the political fence and preening your perfect libertarian feathers (from the imagery you can see I’m quite taken with that green little leprechaun, T. Cup, my parrot) is the only principled position, remember that Ron Paul endorsed Constitution Party nominee, Chuck Baldwin.

Now, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann have come out in support of Doug Hoffman for the 23rd Congressional District of New York. He belongs to the Conservative Party. Who are they? Where is their platform? I see he equivocates about the war, although to be fair it doesn’t sound as though he wants it perpetuated:

“We are past the point of pointing fingers over how we got to where we are in Iraq and Afghanistan. The question for us now is where do we go from here? I believe we must continue to try and turn the security and governing of Iraq over to the Iraqis.”

I know the Constitution Party is against foreign entanglements.

In any event, it’s good that the two women are deepening the rift between the GOP’s liberal wing and its hard-right faction.

Updated: Lackeys On The Left (‘Olby’)

Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Bush, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military, Morality, War

During the Bush and Fox News reign of war, I welcomed the anti-war monologues delivered by the verbose Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown. When last has this Obama lackey said something about the lives the new war president has squandered? I don’t need a repeat of Olbermann’s Bush-era, interminable, self-aggrandizing soliloquies, but a word about Obama’s failure to bring the troops home would not go unnoticed. Moreover, how ridiculous is Olbermann’s signature sigh-off—“so and so days since the declaration of mission accomplished in Iraq”—given the failure of his man Obama to change the status quo.

The administration has stated that Fox New is the organ of the Republican Party. This is true about many of the networks operatives. But what then is MSNBC, and especially Rachel Maddow and Olbermann? The two are uncritical slaves to the ship of state just as long as the pirates at the helm are Democrats.

A contrast to those two clowns is Andrew J. Bacevich, a military man as well as a man of the mind whose lovely son was killed in Iraq. Bacevich has provided consistent, principled commentary throughout. This via Daily Kos (I’m afraid):

Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.

Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around. Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in early 2007 when President Bush launched his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy.

Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues. Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.

More than six years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago, General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for another five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.

Update (Oct. 22): COULTER ON KEITH, “The Grating Communicator”:

“I don’t blame Keith personally for this blatant distortion: He gets all his research material from Markos Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers, so he can’t be held responsible for the content of his show. Keith’s principle contribution to the program is his nightly display of self-congratulation and pompous douche-baggery.

“Remember, Keith, like his MSNBC colleague Contessa Brewer, majored in “communications” in college, not a research-related field, such as political science. In his coursework, he learned such skills as: Dramatically Turning to Camera, Hysterical Self-Righteousness, Pausing Portentously and Gravely Demanding Apologies/Resignations From Various Public Figures.

Given this background, it’s understandable that Keith will make errors. As viewers witnessed recently, he can’t even pronounce the name of prominent American economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell. (Although he did spend three weeks at a Berlitz course in Arabic honing his pronunciation of ‘Abu Ghraib’ to razor-sharp prissiness.)

The bloggers and Keith bring different skill sets to the game. They provide the tendentious half-truths, phony opinion polls and spurious social science, while Keith provides his booming baritone, gigantic ‘Guys and Dolls’ suits and gift for ridiculous, fustian grandiloquence. Keith is far better equipped than, say, the pint-sized, girly-voiced, Frito Bandito-accented Markos Moulitsas to deliver the party line.

Again, in fairness to Keith, he’s never been a ‘content guy.’ He was a communications major. (The agriculture school Keith attended offered a degree in this field.) He lifts the material for his show from liberal blogs, overwrites it, and throws in his trademark smirking and snorts. But that’s all he does because, again, he was a communications major.”