Revisiting Vietnam and Whitewater

Embarrassed man handcuffs wife
to bed during intimate moment,
has to call police to free her.

Here we go again. Obama’s Vietnam is beginning. General Petraeus, who apparently believe his “surge” worked in Iraq, now is calling for a similar surge in Afghanistan. There is some doubt as to how well the surge in Iraq contributed to the decrease in violence in that unfortunate land. Even if it could be proven that it did work, will it also work in Afghanistan, where the situation is quite different? I admit to having no expertise in these matters, but as my brain still functions at least a bit, I cannot help but wonder what sense any of this makes. As I understand it, some 72% of the country is now controlled by the Taliban. They are said to be slowly encircling Kabul, the capital. Afghanistan is a large country of exceedingly rough terrain with few decent roads, most of which is controlled by various warlords. What can another 20,000 troops do in this situation? Apparently the plan is to protect Kabul and President Karzai, and to protect the citizens from the Taliban, establish schools, protect women’s rights, and so on. If there is some other goal for our being in Afghanistan it is no longer mentioned. It appears to me that we are apt to have another airlift as we did previously in Berlin, as the Taliban are actively cutting off our supply routes and slowly winning the “war.” Does this make sense? I cannot believe that 20,000 more troops can do much of anything other than protect Kabul. So, unless we come to some other plan, like sending even more and more troops as we did in Vietnam, the best we can hope to achieve is some kind of stalemate. Is that what we are going to do? Keep an insufficient number of troops in Afghanistan to try to prevent the Taliban from capturing Kabul? This would provide some kind of victory? This is crazy, as near as I can tell. It is our continued presence there that seems to be uniting the country behind the Taliban and against our occupation. Rather than sending more troops, which will inevitably lead to sending more troops, we should seek some way of getting out as gracefully as possible. While it might be a bitter pill to swallow, we are not going to “win” in Afghanistan, not without a million or more troops and some kind of full scale invasion. Obviously that is not going to happen, so why just send more sacrificial troops on a lost cause? Then there is Pakistan. Are we going to end up going there also? And then Iran? Obama had better rethink American Foreign Policy, and do it quickly, before it is too late to salvage anything out of the Middle East.

Not only does Obama have to face a dangerous Vietnam moment in Afghanistan, he now is also facing another Whitewater moment. Even though he is obviously innocent of having anything to do with the scandal in Illinois over his vacant Senate seat, the Republicans are going to try everything they can to link him to the crazy Illinois Governor. And the MSM are going along with this nonsense as usual. David Schuster, who is proving to be a poor replacement for David Gregory, just keeps on insisting there are important questions that need to be answered right now about Obama’s links to this episode of corrupt Illinois politics. Even when his own commentators tried to politely wave him off, he just kept on insisting there has to be something questionable involved. It is obvious that Obama is “clean” in this respect, and was not involved in picking his replacement, and, indeed, went out of his way to stay out of it, the Republicans and their media toadies are going to keep at it, in the most picky detailed way they can, just as they mercilessly pursued the Clintons. When Obama was asked what was wrong with Illinois politics he reportedly said something to the effect that when politicians are in politics for what they can do for themselves instead of what they can do for the country this is what happens. Is that not a perfect description of how the Republican party has acted for the past few years? Can anyone say they have done anything positive for the country in the past eight years? Name just one thing they have done for the country instead of their party and their corporate cronies. Now they are continuing along the same disastrous path. When I was a boy I was told that the Republicans were for business, whereas the Democrats were for laborers. This has not changed in my lifetime, except that the stakes have grown higher, the tactics more sleazy, the greed more apparent, morality more absent, ethics abandoned, and the common good ignored in favor of the wealthy, who have become now the obscenely wealthy, and still want more and more. And our pretense of democracy has been exposed for the lie it has become.

LKBIQ:
“What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and what’s good for General Motors is good for the company.”
Charles Wilson

TILT:
Cats have been associated with humans for at least 9,500 years.