As I write this it is before the President has announced his policy. This is deliberate because I did not want my views to be influenced by the President's decision.
What disturbs me is that it is a very complicated decision and yet most people, whether Left or Right hold strong opinions lacking nuance or even real understanding.
Thus Cheney, our former V-P who dithered for eight years about having a real strategy in Afghanistan, or about adequately sourcing it, accuses our President of dithering because, unlike our previous President, Bush, he has a deliberative consultative way of reaching decisions. Instead of going, as the former President did, “by his gut”; he takes two month to reach a considered conclusion. To the former V-P it seems everything is a no-brainer, whether it is torture or escalating the commitment of our overstretched troops, and his Republican allies in the Congress are no different.
The hawks even go so far as to argue that we could have and should have won in Vietnam. See the article in Newsweek of November 16 by Evan Thomas and John Barry but that is so unhinged from reality that it is hardly worth time and effort in refuting, for it assumes that it was important for us to win in Vietnam, which subsequent developments have disproved. Losing did not affect our security (the domino theory was wrong) and today we have friendly relations with that regime. In fact it seems that losing in Vietnam had more positive results than winning in Korea, for N. Korea is a hostile state while Vietnam is an important trading partner. As for “we could have won” assumes infinite patience on the part of the American Public and a level of military firepower that might well have inflamed the region in a conflagration, (we dropped more explosives on little Vietnam than on all the axis countries in WW II) which could have set off the 3rd World War.
On the other hand many in the liberal camp, such as Bob Herbert, writing in the New York Times of November 8, 2009, without evaluating the security aspects of the Afghanistan war, seem to feel, in his words that, “We’re worried about Kabul when Detroit has gone down for the count.” That is a wrong and simplistic, though a populist analysis. When we have problems at home it does not follow that we should ignore the problems away from home, and our security can never be dismissed so easily. Would Herbert take similar attitude toward the people of Porto Prince in Haiti. Would he reject, for example, Obama's inspirational words in his inaugural address, "To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds." Would he also say, “We’re worried about Porto Prince when Detroit has gone down for the count.”
Others are ready to equate Afghanistan with Vietnam and to call for a quick end to our involvement."
As I see it, neither conclusion is obvious and those who see ‘the right course so easily” have not considered all its ramifications.
I have heard that we need not commit more troops to Afghanistan because there is actually no real danger to our security from there and that if Al QAEDA does not find a sanctuary there, they will find it elsewhere, in one of the failed states on the African continent. But if that were so they would have already moved, because they have not had a safe haven in Afghanistan for years, are wandering without real bases, as they roam in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan. So the argument that withdrawing from Afghanistan and letting the Taliban/Al QAEDA return does not appear to be valid. Of course, The Taliban and Al QAEDA are not one and the same, but until the Taliban chooses to break the link it might as well be, and there is no indication that they are prepared to do so.
There is also the danger that the Taliban, which now uses Pakistan as a safe haven to attack in Afghanistan, could if in power in Afghanistan use that area as a base to destabilize Pakistan, and that is a far greater danger, though Pakistan, at least for now, seems not very enthusiastic about our stepped up activities in its neighboring state, arguing instead that the more pressure that is brought to bear on the Taliban, the more they are pushed into Pakistan with destabilizing results. This leaves the issue in the grey area to say the least. We are in a situation where we are damned if do and damned if we don’t.
And yet it seems that if we could succeed in keeping the Taliban from overrunning that poor country at a cost that is not excessive in lives and/or treasure it would appear to be the wise thing to do.
But in Shakespeare’s words, “There’s the rub,” for at the moment the Taliban are in the ascendancy. On the other hand that is the direct result of the neglect and inattention given this vital theater while resources where devoted to the wrong place, in Iraq.
Should we not now at least for a limited period see if we can retrieve some limited success from that neglect?
Thus I discount as nonsense the hawks as represented by Cheney and Thomas, but that does not resolve the issue of withdrawal or for that matter a surge. Certainly, the dishonesty and corruption of the Karzai regime does not bode well.
Nor do I join those who feel that the President should be bound by his generals’ recommendations. Our founding fathers, wisely made the President Commander in Chief, not as Bush/Cheney claimed, to enhance the President’s power over the Congress, but to make sure that such important decisions are not made by generals, who have been wrong time and time again, (Lincoln had to keep changing commanders) they misled us in Vietnam, and have never been known for not wanting anything but more troops.
I conclude that it is too dangerous and too early to give up on Afghanistan, but that we must have, if not time lines, performance tests, so we do not get bogged down in an endless and fruitless war. The benefits of a successful pacification of the area are too great not to allow for one last and limited effort.
This view will not earn me kudos from Right or Left, but there are times when the middle is not a straddle, but the right place to be.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
19 comments:
Very good. Makes a lot of sense.
As I write the President has not yet made his statement vis-a-vis our presence in Afghanistan, but I am afraid that he will not make me feel any better about the increase in troops and in treasure. I think you do not take seriously enough the enormous expense of adding over 30,000 troops (we are told $1 million per soldier), especially while we also engage in nation-building there. Have we learned nothing from the Russian adventure there? Have we not learned that the Afghan people have little stomach for prolonged battle? Have we not learned that the Taliban, who are in fact the Afghan people,will always be a force in that country? Have we not learned that the leadership is corrupt? There is no "winning" this war.
Yes, we need an intelligence force in the region, especially when Pakistan's nuclear capability is so close at hand. I do believe
that our president is well aware of that and will do everything he can to strengthen the Pakistanis against both the Taliban and Al Quaeda and he will protect whatever intelligence force we deploy in the region. We must also remember that Al Quaeda is not linked to any state and can operate anywhere in the world ... maybe even in Haiti, or in our backyard. The time to attack Al Quaeda was just after we originally went into Afghanistan. Now they are too diffuse a force.
Bob Herbert mentioned the tapes of Lyndon Johnson which showed his distaste for escalating the war in Vietnam.
Johnson went on to do it anyway for political reasons; he didn't think Americans could stand a "defeat." Instead, he lost his
chance for a second term as president. Too bad, for many reasons. He was otherwise a good president and so many soldiers
lost their lives for nothing. How I wish that wouldn't happen again!
The President has done what I believe is the absolutely right decision. He is giving us a chance to stabilize Afghanistan and prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from using that country as a base for training its combatants, as they did before we drove them out and then let them back in through neglect and from using it as a sanctuary from which to attack Pakistan.
I find it disturbing that so few really analyze each military action own its own terms. I get the feeling that Republicans have
never seen a war they don't love and Democrats, at least since WWII, have never seen one they thought was necessary.
More nuance is required.
The situation may very well be hopeless, but the risks of failure, and I do not talk about victory, are too great not to give it a
last shot to see if we can't rescue something from the myopic, Iraq centric, vision of the last Administration.
You ask, "Have we learned nothing from the Russian adventure there?" Nothing could be less applicable. The Russians were
in every sense of the word invaders and occupiers. As an article in the excellent magazine Washington Monthly said: "The Soviet army killed more than a million Afghans and forced some five million more to flee the country, creating what was then the world’s largest refugee population. The Soviets also sowed millions of mines (including some that resembled toys), making Afghanistan one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. And Soviet soldiers were a largely unprofessional rabble of
conscripts who drank heavily, used drugs, and consistently engaged in looting. The Soviets’ strategy, tactics, and behavior were, in
short, the exact opposite of those used in successful counterinsurgency campaigns.
"Unsurprisingly, the brutal Soviet occupation provoked a countrywide insurrection that drew from a wide array of ethnic groups
—Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras—and every class in Afghan society, from mullahs to urban professionals to peasants. By
contrast, the insurgents in Afghanistan today are overwhelmingly rural Pashtuns with negligible support in urban areas and among other ethnic groups.
"That makes quite a difference to the scale of today’s insurgency. Even the most generous estimates of the size of the Taliban force hold it to be no more than 20,000 men, while authoritative estimates of the numbers of Afghans on the battlefield at any given moment in the war against the Soviets range up to 250,000. The Taliban insurgency today is only around 10 percent the size of what the Soviets faced." http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0907.bergen.html (This article is worth reading) (Cont. on next post)
(Cont. from previous post)
In addition the US supplied arms and logistical support to the insurgency. There is no great power backing the Taliban now and
they are hugely unpopular."
You ask, "Have we not learned that the Afghan people have little stomach for prolonged battle?"
This seems rather at odds with the facts. The Afghans have been at war since 1989 when the Soviets invaded. How can anyone say the they have no stomach for prolonged battle. Yes they are tired of war. Who wouldn't be. But they do not want to be ruled by the Taliban and hated them when they were in control.
You say "the Taliban are in fact the Afghan people". This is clearly not true. they are a small minority and a hated one, who rule by fear and oppression. The assertion amazes me. If it were true I would agree that we can not, and should not try to defeat a united people, but it is completely and utterly not correct.
Al Qaeda is not diffuse. They attack in many places but their leadership is still in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. They have no bases anywhere else and certainly not in Haiti.
And we come back to Vietnam. There are lessons to be learned there, but it is not that we must never again fight no matter what
the threat. We had an unending commitment to Vietnam. Obama has made it clear that our commitment in Afghanistan is limited to two
years.
A surge is worth the cost of having a chance to protect us and the rest of the world from the scourge of terrorism.
War mongering is always wrong, but so is pacifism or isolationism, and I fear that my political brethren have become pacifists
and isolationists. Obama, fortunately is above all, a pragmatist, and I like to consider myself one, even though I an deeply committed to liberal principles.
(Cont. in next post)
(Cont. from last post)
Since most people don't take the time to read referenced articles, I believe I should give the readers another quote from the Washington Monthly article because
it is so informative and cogent.
"...the war there will be a rerun of Vietnam? Hardly. The similarities between the Taliban and the Vietcong end with their mutual hostility toward the U.S. military. The some 20,000 Taliban fighters are too few to hold even small Afghan towns, let alone mount a Tet-style offensive on Kabul. As a military force, they are armed lightly enough to constitute a tactical problem, not a strategic threat.
"By contrast, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army at the height of the Vietnam War numbered more than half a million men who were equipped with artillery and tanks, and were well supplied by both the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. And the number of casualties is orders of magnitude smaller: in Afghanistan last year, 154 American soldiers died, the largest number since the fall of the Taliban; in 1968, the deadliest year of the Vietnam conflict, the same number of U.S. servicemen were dying every four days.
"Estimates of the total civilian death toll in Vietnam are in the low millions, while estimates of the total number of Afghan civilian casualties since the fall of the Taliban are in the thousands.
"Nor has the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan been anywhere near as expensive as Vietnam was—in fact, that’s in part why American
efforts have not met with as much success as they could have. During the Vietnam War, the United States spent almost 10 percent of its
GDP on military spending. Today’s military expenditures are somewhere between 4 and 5 percent of GDP, and of that, Afghanistan last year consumed only 6 percent of the total expenditure, while Iraq sucked up some five times that amount. And unlike the Vietnamese and Iraqis, Afghans have generally embraced international forces. In 2005, four years after the fall of the Taliban, eight out of ten Afghans expressed in a BBC/ABC poll a favorable opinion of the United States, and the same number supported foreign soldiers in their country.
"Contrast that with Iraq, where a BBC/ABC poll in 2005 found that only one in three Iraqis supported international forces in their country.
"While the same poll taken in Afghanistan this year reported, for the first time, that just under half of Afghans have a favorable view of the United States, that’s still a higher approval rating than the U.S. gets in any other Muslim-majority country save Lebanon. And a solid majority of Afghans continue to approve of the international forces in their country. What Afghans want is not for American and other foreign soldiers to leave, but for them to deliver on their promises of helping to midwife a more secure and prosperous country.
(Cont. on next post)
(Cont. from last post)
"Skeptics of Obama’s Afghanistan policy say that the right approach is to either reduce American commitments there or just get out entirely. The short explanation of why this won’t work is that the United States has tried this already—twice. In 1989, after the most successful covert program in the history of the CIA helped to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, the George H. W. Bush administration closed the U.S. embassy in Kabul. The Clinton administration subsequently effectively zeroed out aid to the country, one of the poorest in the world. Out of the chaos of the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s emerged the Taliban, who then gave sanctuary to al Qaeda. In 2001, the next Bush administration returned to topple the Taliban, but because of its ideological aversion to nation building it ensured that Afghanistan was the least-resourced per capita reconstruction effort the United States has engaged in since World War II. An indication
of how desultory those efforts were was the puny size of the Afghan army, which two years after the fall of the Taliban numbered only
5,000 men, around the same size as the police department of an American city like Houston. We got what we paid for with this on-the-cheap approach: since 2001 the Taliban has reemerged, and fused ideologically and tactically with al-Qaeda. The new Taliban has adopted wholesale al-Qaeda’s Iraq playbook of suicide attacks, IED operations, hostage beheadings, and aggressive video-based information
campaigns. (The pre-9/11 Taliban had, of course, banned television.)
"Why should we believe that the alternative offered by the Obama administration—committing large numbers of boots on the ground
and significant sums of money to Afghanistan—has a better chance of success? In part, because the Afghan people themselves, the center of gravity in a counterinsurgency, are rooting for us to win. BBC/ABC polling found that 58 percent of Afghans named the Taliban — who only 7 percent of Afghans view favorably — as the greatest threat to their nation; only 8 percent said it was the United States.
"There are other positive indices. Refugees don’t return to places they don’t think have a future, and more than four million Afghan refugees have returned home since the fall of the Taliban. (By contrast, about the same number of Iraqi refugees fled their homes after the American-led invasion of their country in 2003, and few have returned.) There are also more than two million Afghan kids in schools,
including, of course, many girls. Music, kites, movies, independent newspapers, and TV stations—all of which were banned under the Taliban—are now ubiquitous. One in six Afghans now has a cell phone, in a country that didn’t have a phone system under the Taliban.
And, according to the World Bank, the 2007 GDP growth rate for Afghanistan was 14 percent. Under Taliban rule the country was so
poor that the World Bank didn’t even bother to measure its economic indicators.
(Cont. on next Post)
(Cont. from last post)
"Today 40 percent of Afghans say their country is going in the right direction (only 17 percent of Americans felt the same way in
the waning months of the Bush administration). Considering Afghanistan’s rampant drug trade, pervasive corruption, and rising violence, this may seem counterintuitive—until you recall that no country in the world has ever suffered Afghanistan’s combination of an invasion
and occupation by a totalitarian regime followed by a civil war, with subsequent "government" by warlords and then the neo-medieval
misrule of the Taliban. In other words, the bar is pretty low. No Afghan is expecting that the country will turn into, say, Belgium, but there is an expectation that Afghanistan can be returned to the somewhat secure condition it enjoyed in the 1970s before the Soviet invasion, and that the country will be able to grow its way out of being simply a subsistence agricultural economy."
"Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is well poised to deliver on these expectations because it primarily emphasizes increased security for the Afghan people—the first public good that Afghans want. In the south of Afghanistan, where the insurgency is the most intense,
the U.S. is deploying two Marine brigades and a Stryker brigade, 17,000 soldiers in all, to supplement the thinly stretched British, Dutch, and Canadian forces in the region. These are not the kind of units that do peacekeeping; they will go in and clear areas of the Taliban and, most crucially, hold them. This will be a major improvement in a region where NATO forces have often had enough manpower to clear areas but not to hold them. One Western diplomat in Kabul joked grimly to me that every year in the south NATO soldiers have gone in to "mow the lawn."
"This time the idea is not to let the grass grow back.
"One potential objection to Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is that the thousands of additional American soldiers that are now
deploying to the country will only be the thin end of the wedge, because the Pentagon will inevitably ask for significantly more troops. This is a reasonable concern, but should be obviated by the fact that dramatically scaling up the size of the Afghan army and police is the best American exit strategy from the country, and that effort is at the heart of Obama’s plan."
Au contraire, we can learn from the Russian fiasco in Afghanistan. Yes, they were invaders, even marauders, but even after killing as many Afghans as they did .. you say one million ... they couldn't achieve their mission. How many people will we kill? Or is that not a pragmatic question ....
Oh, yes, the Taliban are Afghans, even though they may be a small minority. They easily mingle with the rest of the population
because they are their fathers, sons and brothers. That is a big reason they are so hard to fight.
Al Qaeda, on the other hand, can operate anywhere. It has chosen the difficult landscape of the Afghan/Pakistani border because it is so porous and because there seem to be many hiding places (also because there exists a population there that is sympathetic to their cause), but its operations can be directed from just about anywhere, if I am to believe what I have often read in the press. I chose to say they could operate out of Haiti only because you had mentioned Haiti, not because I thought that's where there is currently a headquarters. Who knows, maybe Sudan will more readily welcome them if things get too difficult where they are now ... or any of a number of other troubled spots around the world.
A stateless terrorist operation is easily transportable. I fear we will be fighting that war long into the future and in many locations, which is why I consider our intelligence capability the most important element of the battle. I do not consider myself a pacifist, but I do want this country to refrain from restructuring a society that does not want to be restructured, all the while killing far too many people, as a way of ostensibly keeping us safe from terrorist attack. It just won't work.
Thanks for provoking me.
P.S. I remain an admirer of Obama (although I did not hear his speech last night) but that doesn't mean I will always agree with his
decisions. In this case, I side with Joe Biden, who is no pacifist.
I want to comment on Joe Biden.
Like Claudia I do not always agree with Obama, and I emphatically do not agree with his choice of Joe Biden for V-P or as a major advisor. The only thing that I see Biden as being good as is putting his foot in his mouth. He was dramatically wrong when he advocated a partition of Iraq along ethnic lines, which would have created three countries at war with each other and with its neighbors, and while he certainly has been
exposed to foreign affairs as chair of the Foreign Affairs committee, I don't see that this has brought him great wisdom.
I mostly like Emil Scheller's commentary.
I wanted to pick up on Emil comments on past wars where I do disagree with him.
1. Korea.
North Korea invaded the South and our US occupation army (which left over from WWII) was pressed back and holding on by its fingernails in the far south of Korea. We had about 16 nations with us, who contributed troops, who fought together with us under the UN Flag.
Initially, after the highly successful United Nations Inchon landing, the North Koreans were caught off guard and defeated. The issues were that General Douglas MacArthur probably privately wanted to invade China. Moreover, his actions might perhaps partially justify your concerns about these matters. You may remember that the Chinese invaded Korea and caught McArthur in strategic overstretch.
President Truman made the right choice (in my view), and protected the south. The UN established a line north of Seoul but did not try to end the military dictatorship in the North.
The result is a successful South Korea with a GDP per capita of about $20,000 per year and lots of Koreans living well. In the north the GDP is about $500 per year.
So I disagree with Emil about this one
II. Vietnam.
This War is a more complicated story. There were lots of mistakes.
When we were thinking about our Guide to Economic Growth in Post Conflict Countries, I tried to round up some USAID economists who worked in Vietnam. The story they tell is of a technical success -- the Delta was a place that was very dangerous for Americans to go initially.
Working with the farmers and villagers, our folks made an enormous difference. However, the South Vietnamese Army we were trying to build turned out to be not very good and the North invaded and defeated that Army. We did not fix the politics by relying on generals as leaders. Terrible idea.
But in Indonesia there was an impact of sorts. The Indonesian Communist party (the PKI) and the Indonesian Army were the two primary adversaries. I am sure that our hand was in this) struggled for dominance. It got pretty nasty. I have some of this first hand from a senior Indonesian (Central Bank Governor) who was a youth leader in this struggle and was sent to the US to study economics to prevent his being murdered by the PKI
He believes that the US intervention in Vietnam gave the Army stomach to fight back. Indonesia is now a successful multiparty democracy.
Moreover, Korea, Taiwan and Japan all helped to sell us the goods and equipment needed to fight the Vietnam war.
Emil's comments about what has happened to Vietnam in general parallel the story I would have told. But the impacts of our intervention elsewhere in Asian were major. Korea, Taiwan, and Japan all achieved good.
Mr. Aten misinterpreted my views on Korea. In making my comments, I did not mean to imply that the intervention was unjustified or wrong.
I believe, as he does that it was the right thing to do. I was simply pointing out that sometimes losing (Vietnam) brings better results than winning. (Korea, though more accurately that was a standoff.) I agree with everything he says on this subject.
As to Vietnam, I find his comments extremely interesting. His elucidation on the positive impact on Indonesia and more indirectly on
South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan are factors I had never heard before. I take it, however, that he is not arguing that these positive incidental results justified the prolonged war or outweighed its negatives.
I might add that I found the description of the many mistakes in Vietnam in Neil Sheehan's book "A Bright Shining Lie" to be extremely elucidating.
Mr. Aten's comments about USAID and his role in it leads me to think that he is in a better position to comment than most of us, and I can't help wondering about his background. Would he mind enlightening me, and through me my readers.
I want to thanks him for his input."
Quick answer to Emil's question
I left my job at the time because of my objection to the Vietnam war.
Ph.D. and MA in Economics (New York University)
MA in Philosophy.(U of Chicago)
BS in Mathematics (U of Illinois)
I have worked for USAID on economic issues for 16 years, including 9 years in the field in Indonesia.
Before that, the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget (housing programs, as, for example, I was on the team who took Fannie
Mae private in 1968), the Hill (Joint Economic Committee staff), Commerce, and Vice President and Chief Economist of MAPI which represents most major American manufacturers who are free traders.
Before that New York City mayor's office when John Lindsay was mayor.
Worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense 1975-67. Left my career position over the Vietnam War issue. I was close enough to the center there so that I knew the Pentagon Papers were accurate. I was regularly a source for IF Stone's Biweekly, if you know what that was.
While Bob Aten does not say so in so many words, I conclude that he is still in the service of USAID since his e-mail address is @usaid.gov
My feeling before the President's speech was that, as with Iraq, we should get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible because we are never going to eliminate an domestic insurgency. I am dubious about efficacy of the President's plan, but I have decided to support him (not that he needs my support, of course) for several reasons. First, although I think this will end up a failure, with a loss of lives and treasure we cannot afford, I haven't studied the situation the way the President has. I believe he gave it his full attention, listened to all sides, and is making a decision based on what he genuinely believes is right. Unlike his predecessor, who made decisions based on political calculations, ignorance and simple
vengeance (Saddam "tried to kill my Dad"), this President is smart and intellectually honest (heck, I wish sometimes he'd be more politically
calculating!). I voted for him because I trust his judgment, and indeed, trust that his informed judgment is better than my much less informed judgment. Therefore, I will trust him on Afghanistan, and will hope for the best. I would love to be proved wrong here.
I think that Malchman's approach is a perfectly reasonable one. There are times when it is appropriate to put trust in those who have greater access to information, to a variety of views and arrive at conclusions through a thorough analytical process and let the facts lead to the conclusion, instead of manipulating the facts to fit the conclusion, as the previous Administration did.
However, I don't think that the soundness of the conclusion can be judged by its success or failure. We should never evaluate decisions on the basis of hindsight.
I support the Obama decision because while I believe that the odds are against succeeding in stabilizing Afghanistan, the benefits from success would be so great, and failure would be so detrimental, that the effort is worth while, provided that it is not open ended as Vietnam was, and provided we are prepared to admit defeat if that is what the facts show in two years. Giving it that last college try after 8 years of "dithering" makes every bit of
sense to me.
The Afghan war has made me understand Tevye anew: 'On one hand, and the other hand, and on this hand... etc.'
There are NO good answers. Both Sally Share and you are both, 100 % in your analysis. Except, that you stated that "Republicans
have never seen a war they don't love." This is a cheap shot, and you are capable of much better thinking than that statement indicates.
How about admitting that Democrats love free lunch? Someone else should pay the tab (higher taxes). And more importantly, someone else's son to die in "Nam or now in the poppy fields of that G-d forsaken country.
Furthermore, I am disgusted with the women of NOW, "liberal" Democrats all.
To a woman, they have been curiously quiet in this to-the- death- struggle with those Muslim forces who would enslave women in ignorance.
My favorite story is the fact that Saudi matrons have to purchase bras & panties from men, because male - owned stores cannot employ women.
So Saudi women are faced with the necessity of trying on bras with men as the salesmen. How ridiculous is that.
My theory is that the surge in Iraq was victorious because Al-Quada overplayed its hand in the villages. They banned women from purchasing "suggestive" fruits & vegetable like cucumbers, zucchini, etc in the markets, forcing the men to go shopping (clearly women's work). AND more importantly, those terrorists wanted to kill the female goats for running around with their 'privates' showing. Since the female goats have babies,
and supply the milk for cheese, they are one of the means by which Iraqi farmers define their wealth. I noted that at that time the farmers started turning the Al-Quada hiding in their villages, to the American soldiers.
Let NOW get on the job by decrying the instances of women and girls in Muslim societies being subjected to grave physical, economic, educational, legal, medical and psychological cruelties, and even death. My least favorite story made the front pages, but far less coverage than the Tiger Woods incident. A school for girls caught fire, and the girls and their teachers fled WITHOUT their headscarves. Grown men beat them back into the fire, and several died. How's that for 'all religions are equal.'
I am tired of Muslim paid - for attacks on Israel aided and abetted by leftists in the Democratic party and right- wing skinheads, who don't belong to any party, but enlist in the US Army, and are trained on the computer - based weapons.
The liberals should at last, be honest. Anti- Israel attacks are anti-Jewish attacks. It is politically correct anti-Semitism, particularly on American campuses.
Moreover, "liberal" attacks on the freedom for people to protest views different from one's own, is fascism. You don't have to like what I'm saying. It's my right as an American to say what I think. Any suppression of that freedom by the forces of the left is totalitarianism.
Remember the Nazi party was the National Socialist Party. Trotsky wanted freedom for himself to decide what was better for the masses.
Trotsky was no democrat (small d), & he was bumped off by Stalin. One dictator despises other potential dictators as much as they hate freedom.
Let the "masses" decide what is best for themselves. The masses voted for Obama and a Democratic party majority in both the House
and Senate. Were the masses correct in that instance, but terribly wrong when they turn out for Tea Parties? I may think that one or the other decision is a dreadful mistake. But who died and left me boss? Or Scheller either?
Nancy Boymen's disquisition is not entirely on point. She emphasizes that: "It's (her) right as an American to say what (she) think(s)." and indeed it is, but I do not have an obligation to distribute it. Nevertheless, I do so because I would rather err on the side of distributing irrelevant material than to err in not allowing it to see the light of day, and be thought guilty of censorship.
I cannot resist one comment. Nancy complains that my saying: "Republicans have never seen a war they don't love." is a cheap shot. Yet she seems to not consider
it a cheap shot when I said, "Democrats, at least since WWII, have never seen one they thought was necessary." I wonder why?
I recommend reading the articles in the N.Y. Times by by Frank Rich and Tom Friedman. The can be found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06rich.html?ref=opinion and
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinio/06friedman.html?ref=opinion
I have found an excellent article in the New Yorker by Hendrick Hertzberg who I think does a very objective analysis of the option which were available to the President, and concludes that the President made the right decision. That article can be found at:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/12/14/091214taco_talk_hertzberg
Finnaly the President accepted the Nobel Peace prize in Oslo yesterday. The speech which lasted just 21/2 minutes can be heard at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8405959.stm?ls
Post a Comment