printNEW COLUMN: “Bringing The Military-Industrial Complex Home,” or “State Department Still Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” is on WND.COM, the Unz Review and The New American (“War Is the Health of the State — and the Statists“).
Excerpt:
Realpolitik: What Modest Foreign Policy Looks Like
Similarly, you are not a good pack animal unless you worry about “the Uyghurs, the Uyghurs. China is oppressing the Uyghurs. Our values, our values.”
Uyghurs are also China’s biggest headache, now that America is no longer mired in Afghanistan. What the dummies on the idiot’s lantern fail to tell you—although analysts at The Economist do—“Uyghurs count among thousands of foreign jihadists active in Afghanistan, mostly enlisted in Taliban ranks.”
So, as the skittish media hounds and politicians, stateside, gnash teeth and beat on breast over Afghanistan, less hysterical countries, abutting Afghanistan, are acting calmly in their national interest, to ensure that Jihad and heroin don’t spill over their borders.
Unlike Lara Kissinger Logan of Fox News, who “thinks” America could have won a war that other superpowers have lost—the Chinese and the Iranians are hip to what just happened. This was “probably one of the best conceived and planned guerrilla campaigns ever,” says Mike Martin, a former British army officer in Helmand province, now at King’s College London. “The Taliban went into every district and flipped all the local militias by doing deals along tribal lines.”
In negotiations with the Taliban, Beijing has thus realistically demanded that Afghanistan not become “a base for ethnic Uyghur separatists.” For their part, “Taliban leaders have pledged to leave Chinese interests in Afghanistan alone and not to harbor any anti-China extremist groups.”
Like Beijing, Tehran, too, is busying itself with realpolitik….
… In all, after Afghanistan, we can all agree that American foreign policy is an angels-and-demons Disney production—starring the prototypical evil dictators killing their noble people, until the US rides to the rescue—and that the producers at Foggy Bottom don’t have the foggiest idea what they are doing. …
… READ ON. “Bringing The Military-Industrial Complex Home,” or “State Department Still Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” is on WND.COM, the Unz Review and The New American (“War Is the Health of the State — and the Statists“).
Slang changes with the times, and the military is no different. Soldiers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have developed an expansive new military vocabulary, taking elements from popular culture as well as the doublespeak of the military industrial complex. The U.S. military drawdown in Afghanistan — which is underway but still awaiting the outcome of a proposed bilateral security agreement — is often referred to by soldiers as “the retrograde,” which is an old military euphemism for retreat. Of course the U.S. military never “retreats” — rather it conducts a “tactical retrograde.”