Just because Iraq is the elephant in the room, you can’t ignore the vipers on the floor.
There are two Wars the US is conducting right now, and preparing for a third. Remember Afghanistan? Why isn’t it in the news all the time? Why isn’t it part of Bush’s legacy in the minds of anyone here or in the MSM? Why is it that we don’t have enough troops to win the peace in Iraq? Why is it that we have spent millions and millions of dollars propping up murderous War Lord and Drug Lords all over Afghanistan? Why is it that no one publicly talks about the immorality of taking over a country and purposely enshrining it’s most despotic and evil men as it’s founding fathers and freedom fighters. Our noble reasons for going in are voided by such realities. No one talks of how many times the Russians took and held Kabul. No one talks about how Kabul doesn’t matter in 70% of the country.
How can you rail on troop numbers for one war without speaking of the second?
Mark my words, if Iraq won’t degenerate into civil war, we will make damn sure that Afghanistan will.
We are not in Asia to prevent war or to increase stability. We are there to smash any reasonable resistance to our designs on territory (bases) and global resources. We are there to create war and instability and inter-group conflicts. If we weren’t, we would be doing things differently. Much differently.
I have Afghani friends who have given up the comforts of their American homes and returned to their country in hopes of rebuilding it’s institutions and building a free democracy. While no one speaks of giving up or leaving, they are universally disappointed in the nature of the nation that is arising with the assistance of our Government. The nation we over there to build. Men who have terrorized huge regions of the nation for decades, murderous drug lords who kill and rape to control those unfortunate enough to live under their dominion, these are the men that have been ‘elected’ to national office in Afghanistan. The rush to elections for the benefit of the American domestic audience has institutionalized those who, in the chaos of a generational war, rose to power by the most despicable means and have spent their lives profiting from the export of social destruction (drugs) to European and American cities, from child soldiers, from sheltering bin Laden, from ..
This is the Freedom you paid for. This is the Freedom you paid for for the Palestinians. This is the freedom we are creating in Iraq. This is the freedom that will blow back in all our laps soon enough. A poorly rebuild nation has never arisen as a threat again has it, Liebchen?
If freedom is the right to have the boot on your neck stamped with International approval, then we are spreading it all over Asia. It seems that Freedom is equivalent to a power vacuum to the neo-cons, which is a dangerous conflation. Nature abhors a vacuum, so I wonder if she abhors American freedom.
We can only hope that they bring this freedom back to the United States as well, so that organized criminals can once again rise to the hights of power and even more profit can be wrung out of the citizenry through less than legal means without reprocussion.