Uncle Sam -- Get Out Of The Middle East -- NOW!
spicpussy
To save lives and treasure -- foreign and domestic -- the U.S. should,
soonest:
a) Move most U.S. combat troops from the Middle East back to the
once-United States.
b) Offer Israel a "new" homeland in the U.S., perhaps in Nevada, and
if Israel declines, the country is thereafter "on its own."
c) Cease giving Israel and Egypt annual "defense" funds of $3
billion each.
d) Use returning U.S. military personnel, materiel and technology to
strengthen the "homeland" against any and all enemy infiltrators now
here and enroute.
e) Commit via law the trillions of dollars ticketed for ME
bloodbaths to wrenching our nation out of "The Great Bush Depression,"
and ...
f) Starve and dismantle the military-industrial complex and its
insatiable appetite for war, weapons and materiel, and plan most
future DEFENSE budgets for that purpose and to keep order in the
Western Hemisphere.
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"Why 'Surge Light' won't work"
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Between World War I and World War II, Britain fought all across the
Islamic world, battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name
just two, and usually losing. This caused a fair amount of worry,
introspection, angst and the usual commissions to determine why
history was being so unkind. What the British discovered was what Pogo
could have told them: They had met the enemy and it was them.
Nowhere is Britain's interwar predicament better stated than in David
Fromkin's brilliant and invaluable book about the creation of the
modern Middle East, "A Peace to End All Peace." He writes, "What
Britain faced in the Middle East was a long and perhaps endless series
of individual and often spontaneous local rebellions against her
authority. The rebellions were not directed by foreigners (as Britain
usually suspected); they were directed against foreigners" -- in other
words, Britain herself.
The lesson that Britain learned the hard way now has to be learned all
over again. The trick for the United States in Afghanistan is to
eradicate al-Qaeda and suppress the Taliban -- and do both in such a
way that it does not go from self-proclaimed liberator to perceived
oppressor. Can this be done?
Once again, Fromkin has something to say: "Perhaps if the British
Empire had maintained its million-man army of occupation in the Middle
East, the region's inhabitants might have resigned themselves to the
inevitability of British rule . . . but once Britain had demobilized
her army, the string of revolts in the Middle East became
predictable." In other words, what we now call a surge might have done
the trick, but Britain was out of men, out of money and out of sorts.
It wanted to make war no more.
Somewhat the same thing applies today to the United States. Support
for the war in Afghanistan is ebbing; it is opposed by the left and
increasingly by the center, and what it would really take to achieve
victory -- smash the Taliban -- are troop levels that now seem out of
the question. If leaks from the White House mean anything, President
Obama will opt for a mini-surge, doomed to be called Surge Light,
which would mean an additional 10,000 to 20,000 troops and not the
40,000 or more that Gen. Stanley McChrystal would like.
Trouble is, the middling amount is also the muddling amount. It is
neither here nor there -- not enough to win but more than enough to
run the risk of provoking the ire of the locals. It is a strategy
designed to do nothing much but look like a strategy designed to do a
great deal. It fools no one and will lead to either an escalation or a
huge reduction in forces. It would be best to get to the latter option
as soon as possible. After all, lives are at stake.
The president of Afghanistan is corrupt. He recently won a corrupt
reelection. His brother is allegedly involved in the country's vast,
illicit drug trade without which Afghanistan would hardly have an
economy at all. The country is often compared to Iraq where, for the
time being, a surge did work. But Iraq is different. It always had a
middle class and has, in just one telling statistic, a literacy rate
of 74.1 percent. Afghanistan's is a dismal 28.1. If there were such a
thing as the Fourth World, Afghanistan would be in it.
Sooner or later, truly evil people either get talk shows or killed by
pilotless drones. The latter will be the fate of Osama bin Laden and
his band of monsters -- and the sooner the better. The Taliban may
well take over Afghanistan -- a calamity for women and girls, among
others -- but not really more morally dismal than the United States
standing by in 1991 as Saddam Hussein slaughtered Iraqi Shiites
because it did not affect our national security. The real concern is
Pakistan and its nukes. Should any of them go loose, we may learn the
hard way what really caused the dinosaurs to become extinct.
There are many good reasons to put as much as we can in Afghanistan.
But America has been at war there since 2001, at war in Iraq since
2003, and like Britain between the world wars, is out of both treasure
and patience. Leave Afghanistan to the drones and the Special Forces.
It's no way to win, but it's a good way not to lose.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/09/AR2009110902600.html