Civil War President
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Barack Obama’s intensification of the occupation of Afghanistan is nothing less than a full commitment to one side in the civil war raging there. What he calls a threat of a Taliban takeover is actually a Pashtun resistance to the U.S. occupation and the corrupt Karzai government it backs. Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s spin cannot change those facts.
Obama’s story isn’t even coherent. Al-Qaeda is in Pakistan, he says, not Afghanistan. (Obama’s speech said nothing about the continuing “secret” drone assault that the U.S. military is conducting there.) Yet he insists that we must see Afghanistan through because that’s where the 9/11 attacks were planned. Well, not actually. You can just as easily say they were planned in Germany and Florida. Why are those terrorist sanctuaries not feeling the wrath of the U.S. military?
Obama vows to defeat al-Qaeda, but what does that mean in the case of a highly decentralized “organization” under whose banner anyone anywhere may claim to be operating? How do you defeat an idea?
Obama promises that U.S. forces will begin leaving in July 2011–maybe, depending on conditions on the ground.
Our only hope is that opposition will keep growing–where is that antiwar movement anyway?–and that the looming 2012 presidential election will prompt Obama to get out.
But in the meantime, Afghan people, expect more U.S.-sponsored violence, more maimed and dead babies and children, compliments of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t regard someone as my enemy merely because he refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Karzai’s gang.
Filed under: Uncategorized
The thing about “where is that antiwar movement anyway?” is that it wasn’t so much an anti-war movement as it was an anti-war-in-Iraq movement. There was nowhere near the protests when we went into Afghanistan as there was when we were gearing up for Iraq because most people understood the need to go into Afghanistan in the first place, whereas the case in Iraq was not so clear.
It was an anti-Bush movement. Bush is gone, war is now back en vogue.
Let’s roll the dice again, and see if we get a different picture.
The antiwar people were simply anti-war, and rigidly against the concept of balancing war-agression with a strong war-deterrent or capability. The thought was that if we unilaterally disarmed, the rest of mankind would do likewise.
Another more cogent and realistic part of the argument was that if you give a big bunch of power or money to a big centralized government, it will get stolen or mis-used, or in the case of war, good people will get hurt.
So in sneak the anti-BUSH and anti-REPUBLICAN stealth operatives. They take over, and seem like good, rabid, and vocal ANTIWAR folks.
When their guy wins, they melt away, leaving antiwar folks mumbling, “What does ‘co-opted’ mean?” Where IS everybody? What happened?
Now, to let us folks (most conservatives) back under your tent, you’ll have to stop calling us names. When you yell “NEOCON”, you don’t hurt us; you hurt YOUR ability to differentiate between the good and bad parts of a previous administration, and you can’t understand how some of us supported Bush, and yet criticize honestly much of the same things that you criticize.
Quit using “Al Gore” math (Instead of ocean will rise 22 centimeters (8 inches), says “23 feet”. Instead of earth core temp 5,700, says “millions and millions of degrees”. Instead of some of the climate hoax email was within the last 2 months, says “It’s all over 10 years old and is irrelevant to the current discussion”.)
Instead of lies couched as absolutes and snarky jokes, tell me percentages. I say Bush was 40% good. If you start telling me 100%, either way, I start discounting the rest of what you have to say.
If you use the same snarky exaggeration to describe any of the other neocon/republican/conservative icons or stars, you hurt your antiwar agenda, and you declare me, unnecessarily, as your political enemy.