When the frat boy was in power I was so much angrier. I was always fighting with my ideological enemies because with the war raging in Iraq and American deaths mounting every day, the stakes were so much higher.
Now here we are in the age of Obama and I have mellowed. But that could change. What will change it is if his O ness makes the same mistake the president before him did and try to nation build again in the name of fighting the "war on terror".
First, I agree that right after 911 if we were going to go anywhere it should have been to Afghanistan and not Iraq. It is where Osama bin Laden (OBL) launched his terror network and where he found a safe haven while the Taliban was in control. But in my humble opinion, OBL is probably now on his sixth or seventh virgin and will never be heard from again. The frat boy missed his chance to display his head on the evening news and the guy probably died in his sleep.
Now what we have in Afghanistan is a mess of a problem. And unfortunately his O ness won't get around to it until health care passes.- Or doesn't pass depending on the politricksters in Washington and how they are reading the polls- Instead of committing our troops there when the man we wanted was still alive, the frat boy was giving billions of dollars to the Pakistani,dictator, Musharraf. (Who should be right up there with Valerio Viccei as one of the greatest thieves of all time.) All those billions to fight terror and helps us catch OBL and he was building his military to fight my cricket loving friends in India the whole time. Nice.
Can't say I really blame him, though. Who wants to fight the Afghans? Here in A-merry-ca baseball is our national past time. In Afghanistan it's fighting wars. Just ask the Russians how that little campaign over there worked out for them. Those cats over there have been fighting wars for centuries, it's all they know, so why we would try to nation build in a country like that is beyond me. Talk about getting medieval, they are medieval.
Let's throw in the fact that we are supporting a guy that was probably not even fairly elected and we have a real hypocrisy problem on our hands. But field, if we don't support Hamid Karzai who else are we going to support ? the Taliban? How about none of the above?
The death toll is starting to mount in Afghanistan, and American generals are asking for either more troops or a total withdrawal. The wingnuts and chicken hawks are still saying that we can't "cut and run", that we will look like cowards to the rest of the world. I disagree. American could nuke that entire region with just just a head nod from the chosen one. No one questions our military might. And only a fool would. But the Afghan fighters and Taliban are digging in, and they have been down this road before. Of course, we have too, and it took us years and thousands of lives to get out of places like Vietnam and Iraq. In the case of Iraq, we are still there. Nation building and fighting a war are two entirely different things. We should be nation building our own damn country and fighting the urban terrorist there before we go half way around the world to a bunch of religious fanatics. (Hell we have enough fanatics here that we should be worried about. One of them is on the radio every damn day screaming about the government plot to take over our lives.)
Let's just hope that his O ness sticks to his original script, or even better, scrap the script and get his troops the hell out of there. What we can't have happen is him following the wingnuts and the crowd calling for more troops. We have seen that script before, too, and unfortunately we all know what the final chapter will look like.
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