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INHERITING A CESSPOOL
THE "DECIDER" – MASTER BUNGLER OF ALL TIME
TWO WARS HOPELESSLY LOST – "ENDLESS VIETNAM"
By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER
Yesterday, I "stumbled" on an excellent article on Iraq by Daniel Pipes. Though Pipes writes for "neocon" lobby groups and works for Murdock’s tabloid, the New York Post, he is anything but the usual idiot they keep around. His article, Limping Away from a Shattered Iraq is very telling, if perhaps by accident.
Carelessly picked up by the ‘naysaying right’ (FamilySecurityMatters.org – a GOP anti-Obama "gasbag") as an indictment of Obama policies, it clearly outlines the horrible decisions Bush made in negotiating the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) restricting US troops, actually imprisoning them, in Iraq.
In his whining narrative about how America will suffer for the hopeless mess of Iraq, for decades to come, Pipes, feeding at the trough of his masters, neglects to examine the "inadvisability and illegality" of the ill fated invasion itself.
His prediction, that Iraq will sink into barbarism and fall under the influence of Iran may well be true. The pro-American Kurdish Regional Goverment in the north is becoming more and more independent of the government in Iraq, locked away in a US built fortress called "the green zone." "Cut and run" describes George W. Bush from school to his "truncated" military career to a life of utter failure. Iraq is just another "inconvenient memory" to someone famous for having no memory.
Iraq, an advanced country with an educated and sophisticated populace is a picnic compared to Afghanistan. There, we stumbled beyond belief, tying America to a massive corrupt drug cartel. Those of us know know the players here can’t help but drown in irony……
With little understanding of the primitive nature of Afghanistan or the corrupt government we were forcing on them, we stumbled in, overturned the repressive Taliban regime and replaced it with a central government that governs nothing.
Our history in Afghanistan over the last two decades involved actually putting the Taliban in power and arming and building up the war lords, some of whom would side with us, though war criminals and drug traffickers and some would side against us.
Many have done both. One warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, received over $500,000,000 in US military aid yet is now listed as one of the prime movers behind 9/11. This is not a unique situation. Most of our enemies are sitting on fat bank accounts from the CIA or US AID.
President Karzai is hardly even the mayor of Kabul much less president of Afghanistan. While he is ruling Kabul, or part of it, this former US puppet is usually attacking American efforts to protect him by accusing US troops of war crimes. President Diem of Vietnam was a joy compared to this guy.
After years of ineptitude at the hands of the Bush administration and its "attention defecit" policies, we find ourselves at step one, with an ally incapable of even the most basic defense and government functions, but highly capable of eating billons of dollars and spewing out hundreds of tons of opium with every increasing efficiency.
Was this the plan?
It all comes back to Tora Bora. When we had Osama Bin Laden, he simply got into a white Chevy Tahoe and drove away. We pulled back our troops and assigned his capture to an war lord known to be working with him.
The same "decider" that loaded the Bin Laden family onto planes before the FBI could question them and spirited them out of the country made this decision. What were his motivations?
America now stands, trapped and clueless. We are leaving Iraq as a total disaster, no government, no infrastructure and likely to fall into the hands of our enemies. It cost us hundreds of billions and thousands of lives to accomplish that.
We are pouring troops and money into Afghanistan, trying to repeat our victory in Vietnam. Little could have been done to duplicate Vietnam more accurately without bringing in the jungle.
- We are supporting a corrupt government everyone hates
- We are tying ourselves to drug warlords and war criminals
- We know nothing of the people and their history
- We are fighting an enemy that can hide with the civilian population of disappear across a border at will.
- They can’t lose, they only have to wait until we leave.
How it can be less than obvious to some that our war on terror was planned long before 9/11 amazes me. We have the facts. We know the Iraq invasion was planned "during the campaign" and not in response to any known threat.
The motivation for this? Was it religious insanity on our part? Was it part of a successful attempt to send the US back into the Middle Ages by destroying our economy?
Was it simply a stupid and bored rich kid who had failed at everything in his life who hated his father and wanted to relive grandiosity not seen since the Third Reich? I am going with this one.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran and regular contributor on political and social issues.
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Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=7896
Posted by Gordon Duff on Jul 11 2009, With 0 Reads, Filed under 9/11. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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I agree. I am going with the American Reich thing….although for the life of me I cannot figure out all the inner motivations that would have sustained this insanity in the minds of some very brilliant but obviously deluded people in the Bush camp. What in the hell were they thinking? What America did they grow up within?
I assure you, there were no brilliant people in the Bush camp. Try naming ONE.
g
That is the very, very sad thing. Like ALL American Presidents he had the cream of the crop from the Service Acadamies and the Armed Forces as his three and four star admirals and generals. Other than Shinseki I cannot think of anyone who opened his mouth and told the Emporer that he had no clothes. Shinseki paid dearly for his honesty.
ALL of these guys were top of their class at the Academy, rose through the ranks quickly, went to all the right schools, all had graduate degrees, punched all the right command tickets and had all the right command experience….not ONE of them but Shinseki opposed the President’s view on even minor issues as far as we know relative to his Iraq policies.
Then look at the people he brought onboard from the right wing fundamentalist Christian colleges. There were hundreds of these people farmed out throughout virtually every Executive Branch agency. They ALL could not have been brain dead. And by the way, I wonder how many of his policies the young rabbi, healer and teacher from Galilee would have supported?
Where were these fundamentalist Christian sycophants that surrounded the President in his time for counsel? How were they representing Jesus and his Word when the President asked for advice and then he did the things he did? What Jesus are they subscribing too? I do not know that Jesus. That young healer who was crucified for telling the truth to ears that did not want to hear the truth would have had nothing to do with indiscriminate killing based on foggy data made up by armies of sycophants bent on a murderous agenda fueled by unreasoning hate and rooted in American manifest destiny schizophrenic understandings of world history. He hired hundreds of these people to be high level and mid level decision makers. They read the Bible at lunchtime in Bible Study groups throughout the Executive Branch and then came back to work and planned more obfuscation and political legerdemain to fool the American people.
There is a special place in hell for them. They were smart enough to know better. They read the Bible but never understood it. It is just easier that way. They have to shoulder a lot of the blame, maybe even most of it, for the Bush/Cheney debacles. They kept their mouths shut when they should have been shouting protests. May God have mercy on their souls.
CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)
The fundamentalists call themselves “christian zionists” That is a total oxymoron. You can’t be a “christian” and take your orders and direction from anti-Christ forces. The sincerely faithful are being led astray by judas goats. So many are brainwashed, they just follow whatever BS the well paid televangelists preach.
Apparently Shinseki learned his lesson. We haven’t hear a peep out of him about the VA. No more rocking the boat
Shensiki was here in Toledo last week. It was never mentioned in the paper.
g
at what point do the current people in charge become responsible for what is going on right now-today? they can fire ceo’s in the middle of the night. why not just get the hell out of “the bear trap”? why continue to pour billions into something no one else has EVER been able to do? this is worse than viet nam! we have history to look back on. we are not worth a shit a “nation building”. redrawing the maps (borders) after ww2 was a major mistake. ethnic roots go deeper than a line in the sand. screw afganistan and every one there. get the hell out! NOW!
BUSH IS GONE! HAS BEEN FOR OVER 6 MONTHS! SOMEONE EXPLAIN HOW THINGS ARE BETTER.
8 years of failed wars, attacks on american rights and drunken spending will bury us for decades
your response is neither logical nor rational
this is the biggest single screwup in our history.
g
“BUSH IS GONE! HAS BEEN FOR OVER 6 MONTHS! SOMEONE EXPLAIN HOW THINGS ARE BETTER.” ………..Why ask a question when you already give the answer!!!! plus we still have a lot of his appointed minions in goverment
I guess we can blame Bush for the quadrupling of the debt in 6 months? What about the earthquake off of Coronado island over the weekend? If Bush is so stupid, how did he carry out such an ingenious plan? Can’t have your cake and eat it too!
You guys crack me up. Obama hasn’t changed any of Bush’s policies. At least with Bush, he did what he said he would do. He didn’t screw you from behind like Obama does.
One of these days Obama will no longer get away with using the term “inherited”. I don’t remember Ronald Reagan blaming everything on Jimmy Carter. I only remember him making some tough decisions and fixing the economy!
Bush is no longer in office. As long as you guys continue to focus on him, nothing will improve. Move on and start taking a look at what the current administration is doing!
Yes ….. you can blame bush for the deficit it was his plan and he started giving away monies to the banks well before Obama took the oath, remember the bill to give it away was passed with repub help
OOH and as for Ronnie Raygun he is the one that started all of the deregulation and the trickle down theory remember supply side economics and didn’t he sell weapons and parts to our enemies ? think Iraq starting the whole repuglican theory of how to help the big corperations and get rid of unions
The Iraq war involves undermining American sovereignty and deconstructing what Americans have built since the industrial age more than it does fighting a war on terror.
Drug and mineral profit is the prize booty for Iraq and Afghanistan and the socialist internationalist working at Halliburton,BP, and Exxon profit on the backs of the tax payer.
Socialism and global governance are the invention of extremely rich mattoids. They aren’t satisfied with having so much cash. Now they want to own the world and everyone in it. That is why we have so many no-win wars, fiat money, NAFTA, WTO, high taxes, detrimental regulations, corruption, etc.