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WHICH ONE IN THE TURBAN IS GEORGE WASHINGTON?
Mon, 20 Sep 2010 02:53:58
In my last blog I pondered why the vast majority in this country are so apparently unconcerned about the crusade we've been waging in Afghanistan for the past twenty-five years.
It's a first class disaster, yet people don't hate it the way they hate TARP, Obama-Care and The Stimulus; even though TARP saved us-at least for the time being-from a 30's style depression, Obama-Care ended the nightmare of no health coverage for 32 million Americans and The Stimulus put 800 billion dollars where our mouth belongs-in the greening and regeneration of a nation going rapidly to rust and ruin.
And then Oz Producer Bill McIntyre sent me this picture from 1985:
The caption is a quote from Ronnie: "The Taliban Are The Moral Equivalent Of Our Founding Fathers." Really? I'll have to check to see if Jefferson banned kite flying for fear that someone would use a page from the constitution as a tail.
This shot of The Gipper witlessly schmoozing with these medieval mullahs says it all. We had no idea then, and we have no idea now, who is who over there and what we can possibly accomplish in a region where it's a hell of a lot easier to grow opium than democracy.
First, we sent a gaggle of CIA cowboys and psychopaths over to thumb our noses at the Russians-payback for all the noses they thumbed at us during Viet Nam. We delivered bags of cash and planeloads of sophisticated weapons to any warlord or jihadist who promised to point them at Ivan. It worked. One too many Stingers up the tailpipes of one too many Hind helicopters and Moscow took what was left of their toys and went home.
With no more bullies to torment, we got bored and ignored Afghanistan for the next fifteen years, until our former asset over there filled four airliners full of Saudi brethren with box cutters and made The War On Terror official.
We took out the Al Qaeda training camps with ship-based cruise missiles, taking zero casualties on our side. Ta! Da! The dawn of Global Unmanned Warfare.
And the more Unmanned and Unwomaned it gets, the more we replace G.I.'s with joy-sticks, the more children we remove from this Children's Crusade, the easier it is to keep this debacle a non-topic with the moms and dads and tax revolters at home.
Notice that all the drone and missile attacks on the cars and homes of the targeted locals are described as "surgical." As if there were this great medical practitioner, Dr. Counter Insurgency back in Washington, scanning the globe for cancers and surgically removing them with his Tomahawk and Hellfire scalpels.
If we can get away with printing fiat dollars forever, we can bring all the boys and all the girls home, and run the whole invisible show out of refrigerated control rooms, where young recruits, veterans of the point-and-shoot video culture put missiles between the eyes of every bozo marked with an "x" by the x-perts back at Langley, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom or wherever those killers-at-a-distance are hiding out.