Off to Afghanistan: when will they ever learn?

UPDATE: (2-25-12):

Since I first posted this, it has been reported that several U.S. military personnel, including two high-ranking officers, were killed in connection with rioting and a general uprising among some of the populace in Afghanistan over the burning of Islamic holy books, Korans, reported to have been done recently by mistake by U.S. personnel. They were supposedly burning subversive material and the Korans got mixed in. I suppose since most of our personnel don’t know the native language of the area, and what is it? that could be possible, that it was a “mistake”. But whoever ordered it should be demoted, prosecuted, and sent home. If that was not incompetence, I don’t know what is.

But actually all U.S. personnel need to go home. The Afghan war is a pointless exercise. It apparently takes the United States about a decade to learn these things.

Winning the hearts and minds of people around the world should not be our job. If we minded our own business, they might seek to emulate us because of our standard of living and our freedom. We (the United States) went in there because terrorists used Afghanistan as a staging area and headquarters leading up to the 9/11 attack – ironically we finally killed the master mind of the 9/11 attack, Osama Bin Laden, not there but inside Pakistan, who pretends to be our friend at times for our financial and military support, but who aids and abets our enemies. Because our modern enemies are not uniformed soldiers operating out of specific nations they are harder to fight and beat, but helicopters swooping in with Navy SEALS is a modern tactic, and a drone up the a.. works at times too, although the latter in problematic and poses questions of ethics and whether modern warfare has got so impersonal, those who remotely fly the drones commuting to work and then home again to the suburbs, half way round the world from where the action is, that it adds a new Orwellian dimension that may already be out of hand.

STOP THE MADNESS, STOP THE WARS!

If Ron Paul was not so one-dimensional, he might be the leader who could lead us out of the madness.

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I see via the photos and story in my local newspaper that a local National Guard unit is deploying to Afghanistan.

And I thought all of this was supposed to be over for us (the U.S.).

But it’s never over.

While I fear this is all futile, it is not quite like Vietnam in that the military personnel going over there are all volunteers and interestingly the ages of the soldiers are often much older — one from my hometown or area is in his 50s. In Vietnam young men still in their teens were forced to go fight a senseless war which we had no business fighting and nothing to gain. We may have thought otherwise at the beginning, but it became apparent as time went by that it was all a terrible mistake, a blunder if you will.

I suppose those going over from my area feel that they are serving their country and somehow it all translates into the fight for freedom and against tyranny and extreme Islam. There is also a financial incentive. They signed up because it is an extra job.

I do not condemn them for it. I just don’t agree that it is worthwhile.

And the next part is kind of touchy. While I do not condemn the troops, I do the policy makers who are squandering our tax dollars.

I also think it is heart wrenching to think that some of these people will not make it back or will return terribly wounded. There are mothers and fathers going; in at least one case both the mother and father are going from one family. And as I said. The age span is much wider this time around.

Ironically, I think I once considered — albeit not too seriously — signing up for the unit in question, and for the wrong reason, more money. I served three years in the Army during the Vietnam War but did not go to Vietnam. I don’t know, maybe if I would have singed up for the reserves or guard I might have eventually found myself in Desert Storm or even in Afghanistan — I’m 62 now.

I was no soldier, even though I was in the Army. I did my service, though. I filled a slot.

I think it was former Secretary of State Madeline Albright who said, I think in reference to the Kosovo campaign (one I never understood what our interest in was), “what good is it to have an army if we can’t use it?” (a paraphrase probably, despite my quote marks).

I agree with that sentiment, but we should be awful choosy as to how we use it.

And think of World War I and think of Vietnam:

And think of what Peter Paul and Mary sung: “where have all the soldiers gone, gone to graveyards everyone, when will they ever learn?…”

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CLARIFICATION:

In case anyone was wondering or cared, I inadvertently left out a preposition in my original headline to this post. Been so busy with my real job, I did not catch it till quite a bit later.

Trying to salvage positives from Iraq; war without victory…

So American troops have left or are leaving Iraq after some nine years and 4,500 U.S. dead and thousands more wounded (not to mention millions of Iraqis).

So what was that all about?

This is not the conventional end of a war with the enemy signing surrender papers in a railroad car or on the deck of a ship and in fact it would be hard to say who the enemy was.

If this is what it takes to get rid of one man, Saddam Hussein, someone the U.S. once supported, it certainly was not worth it.

It is true that the real basis for the U.S. to involve itself in armed conflict over there was to keep the Mid East oil supply open. But we did not even get a firm lock on that. The Chinese get oil from there and committed not one troop.

It seems we have set a precedent or a pattern for our modern warfare. We do not go for victory in the traditional sense but instead just bumble along and finally quit. Part of the problem is that we get ourselves into things which promise no real solution from the beginning. This is not a criticism of those who fought and those who died or were wounded. It is a criticism of our leadership and maybe of the American people (of which I am one) as a whole.

Without the acquiescence of the American people (not me, not you, but the people as a whole) we would have never gotten involved.

We are still at a stalemate in Afghanistan. We might do well to just leave now — declare victory and leave, as it were.

The good news is that if we leave these places no more troops die and we could potentially save billions to trillions of dollars to be used much more productively somewhere else.

All of this does not mean we become cowards or complete isolationists or we let our military power deteriorate. We have to be involved in the world as we are still the world’s super power and the leader in democracy. We do need to use our power more wisely and selectively.

I wonder how we recruit people to be in the military when they see the history now is that they are called to sacrifice for lost causes.

Iraq may or may not turn out to be a better place, but that is up to and always has been up to the Iraqis. There is a freedom movement going on in that part of the world. It may not exactly look like what we would prefer at all times, but with modern communication people will not be held down forever. Our interventions at times may do more harm than good and besides they are just too expensive in blood and treasure for us.

There still may be times where we have to act. For instance we could not allow Iran to block the straits of Hormuz. We could not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon — by their deeds and words that nation has proven it is not responsible enough to handle such awesome power.

And if in the future we deem it necessary to intervene militarily anywhere in the world, we should first have a clear and realistic strategy for complete victory. To fight a war and settle for less, while allowing young (and not so young) men and women to die for the cause, is almost as immoral as fighting an unjust war.

I heard one pundit interviewed (didn’t catch the name) who when asked if Iraq was worth it answered that you can’t think of the initial reasoning for our involvement, you just have to see what positives you can salvage from it.

That’s depressing.

Could we face up to another Pearl Harbor? With our political and military leadership, 9/11 is not such a good indication…

I was so busy working I could not post what I wanted to say about the just-passed seventieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7. But here it goes now:

It bothers me that when I was a youngster in school not much was taught about it. For one thing, we were still too close to it. It had not mellowed into complete history yet.

I have no idea what they teach about it nowadays.

What I got growing up was the World War II war movies’ narrative and the notion that Japan just up and attacked us for no reason at all, kind of like a bully on the playground.

I’m not going to go into an essay about the whys and wherefores of all that now, but nothing is ever that easy.

But good or bad, the Japanese had their reasons. They wanted resources for survival.

Oh, gee, doesn’t that sound familiar?

Don’t we (the U.S.) fight for resources (oil) today?

The idea that the Pearl Harbor attack was completely unprovoked is utter nonsense.

And then there is 9/11.

It would be something akin to blasphemy for me or anyone else to say that we provoked that attack upon ourselves. But people and nations and nationalities and religions and cultures (East vs. West), and ideology vs. ideology, are always in competition for power and resources. And there are always the opportunists who take advantage of this natural order of things. In Japan’s case it was the militarists, and in the case of 9/11 it was Al Qaeda, a group who, I believe, uses religion and nationalistic pride as a cover for their own lust for power.

But there will always be competition. It is the way of the human race and the whole animal kingdom.

We certainly have not handled 9/11 like we handled Pearl Harbor.

Part of that is that the two although similar are not the same and we live in  a far different world now.

In the recent past PBS did a documentary on World War II and for those of us who did not actually live through it, one thing we learned from it was that it was not like in the movies. We didn’t just strike back and win overnight. We had a lot of setbacks and made blunders. But we had the will to win and our leaders had the will to lead.

Today we still have our brave and quite able military, but as a society I am not at all sure we have what it takes to win the constant competition in the world. And we for sure do not have the dynamic leadership in the military or the civilian government.

But as of now, the United States of America is still the leading power in the world, and it all really began when we answered the challenge at Pearl Harbor.

Our military has also tried its best to carry on the tradition after 9/11, but leadership from both the civilian and military segments has been lacking.

We just don’t have an FDR or a Gen. Patton and their like.

Facing the militaristic dictatorships of Japan and Germany in World War II, who if left unchecked would have taken over the world (and of course Japan attacked us outright), the will was there because we were fighting for the survival of the free world.

Korea was a stalemate of sorts, but we did push the communists out of South Korea. It was not a popular war but we had military leadership who went for the win, not their retirement and book deals.

Vietnam was a fiasco for a lot of reasons, but a major one was that our leadership, particularly the civilians, were in denial that we really were in a war most of the time and we lacked focus or a clear goal, and we had a mess with a civil war, combined with an outside invasion, and the fact that it was just a proxy war between basically the Soviet Union and the United States.

And I believe it also became a war in which top officers (and lower officers) simply got their ticket punched, their requisite ribbons, and left it behind (and my apologies to those who did more, of which there were certainly some).

I’m not sure what happened in Desert Storm. We seemed to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. We had to go back, or at least felt we did.

In the last day or so I heard part of an interview with a retired Army colonel hawking a book. His thesis seemed to be that we really don’t need to be in the Middle East and that Al Qaeda is not really a threat to us, but rather our own home-grown terrorists are. He also said that we face more vexing problems in our own hemisphere, such as the drug war in Mexico and troubles brewing in the rest of Latin America.

That much I can see, but he also suggested that we have too many ground forces and that it is a waste and we should rely on our true strength in our superior Naval and air forces (Navy and Air Force). My personal opinion is that although we need to be as lean and flexible and therefore as efficient as we can, we must keep up a serious force on all levels, regardless of how we deploy them.

I am not so sure but we should not have a larger manned force in our military. It is a tough world out there with rivals and general forces of evil ready and willing to fill the vacuum. In a addition, a larger force, particularly ground troops, would create a lot of jobs for young people or at least keep a large part of them out of the regular work force for a  period of years, opening up employment for family bread winners.

We probably should consider reinstating the military draft, possibly with the alternative of  non-military national service.

People should start their adult lives with a  strong dose of patriotism. In addition, if everyone had to serve you can be sure our political leadership would be a lot more choosy in committing troops to war. We might actually only fight when we really needed to.

I am late here in recognizing the 70^th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor, but I salute those who took part. I have interviewed some in my past life as a journalist.

War is a terrible thing and it is romanticized. And many who did the least or nothing at all come up with the wildest war stories, while those who really faced the test often keep quiet.

Faced with a deadly challenge none of us knows for sure what we will or would do. The truth of the matter is that a lot of people cannot stand up to it. But the truth is that in our nation’s case (the United States of America), up till now, enough have.

We can never let our guard down either:

Remember Pearl Harbor. Remember 9/11.

P.s.

I would have to read some of his books to know if the colonel whom I referred to has some good points (I suspect he does). His name is Douglas Macgregor and he and his books are listed in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Macgregor

Even though soldiers should follow orders and keep their mouths shut, you can’t blame the general for being resentful and a bit incredulous about the attitude of Afghanistan…

Soldiers are supposed to know how to take orders and move out smartly and otherwise keep their mouths shut and definitely not to step out of the chain of command. Of course a general is not just any other soldier, but their duty is much the same when it comes to following the civilian leadership. They can always resign if they cannot follow the program.

Nonetheless, you can hardly blame that general in Afghanistan (not the top one, but a general nonetheless) for telling it like it is and being incredulous, or more precisely, resentful of the attitude of Afghanistan’s leader Hamid Karzai for saying such things as Afghanistan would take the side of Pakistan if the U.S. went to war with that nation. And he is resentful of the whole attitude of the Afghans he is trying to train.

Gen. Peter Fuller, deputy commander for the NATO training program in Afghanistan, has been relieved of his command for his outspokenness (I link to the story at the bottom of this post).

Too many thousands of lives of U.S. servicemen and other personnel have been lost there already and the U.S. is going bankrupt in what is a quagmire of epic proportions.

If the United States was not spread so thin, it might do well to simply make Afghanistan a protectorate and quit the nonsense of nation building in a land where the inhabitants are either unable or unwilling to govern themselves in a peaceful manner. Now it is their right to live tribally like they have for so many thousands of years, except by aiding and abetting the Taliban in 9/11 they made it our business.

But Osama Bin Laden is dead, and of course he was caught hiding in plain sight, not in Afghanistan, but our fake ally Pakistan.

However, the U..S. is not in any shape to make Afghanistan our 51^st state or whatever.

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

We should leave now and give thanks to those who died or were gravely injured for the cause — it may not have come out as we wished it, but we did keep Al Qaeda tied up and we will continue to deal with them and any others under the mantra: If you attack or threaten the U.S. you can run but you cannot hide”.

We should also leave Iraq altogether. Our combat mission there has been given the boot by an ungrateful nation.

They’ll make do. They have oil. I hope they drown in it.

And to Afghanistan, I say, go back to your tribal affairs and just don’t help terrorists attack us, thank you.

A lot of innocent people, millions, in that part of the world have been killed due to our actions. But as backward as some of them are, there is plenty of communication these days and they have to realize that they can’t just hide behind their sometimes backwards culture as if it were in a vacuum. When it affects us, we feel forced to act, and yes, we may have overreacted.

Maybe East is East and West is West after all.

The story about the fired general:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/peter-fuller-fired_n_1077204.html

P.s.

Yes I know they had culture, and sometimes a very advanced culture, in the Middle East before there ever was a European civilization, but in some ways they failed to progress, at least by our western standards. But again, that’s okay as long as they don’t attack us.

And we really do need to find alternative sources of energy.

IRAQ: What a way for U.S. to end war, it gets the bum’s rush…

So the good news is that the U.S. military will essentially be out of Iraq by the end of the year, President Barack Obama announced today.

But it is a strange way for us to end a war. We are for all intents and purposes being kicked out by the country we invaded, help set up a new government in, and occupied for nearly a decade.

It’s as if either Japan or Germany had kicked us out before we had decided our occupation after World War II was done.

Besides the fact that it was probably a needless war, it shows how we began from a position of strength and then wimped out (the civilian leadership, not the soldiers) then how we almost lost the whole enchilada for a while and then how we came on a little tougher in what was called the surge and then how we wimped out (the civilian leadership again) and are now being run out the country with its government, which is supposed to now be on our side, telling us it can no longer guarantee immunity to our soldiers and contractors. We let them tell us that?

The upside to our modern wars is that not as many people (on our side anyway) die (although a lot do — too many), but the downside is that they don’t seem to settle much and they are a severe financial strain on our economy.

And what is really exasperating in all of this is that anyone knows that the overriding reason we went to war in Iraq in the first place was to secure our oil supply. But we did not even do that. We had a good excuse to take the oil fields over as spoils of war.

Now Iraq is subject to the influence of Iran.

Afghanistan, after a decade remains a quandary and a quagmire.

While our recent adventure in Libya was pulled off without our troops on the ground being involved and no cost of American lives — NATO and the Libyan rebels did the heavy lifting — it is hard to know what will happen there now. Obama took a gamble on that one, bypassing congress, and seems to have won.

But my own position on war continues to be avoid it at nearly all costs, but once there is no way out, do it, go for total victory and unconditional surrender by the forces you face (although with non-state connected terrorists that might not exactly be possible) or at least annihilation of them as far as possible if they do not surrender, and then any occupation for as long as it seems necessary.

As I understand it, we will still have some military and contractors remain in Iraq to train them how to use the weapons we sold and/or gave to them (which they with the help of Iran may one day turn on us).

Hey, but if it all works out for the good, fine. I have my doubts. And the cost has been high — some 4,200 of our troops dead and thousands more gravely wounded and a trillion dollars that could have been spent on health care, business investment, environmental cleanup or just mad money in the pockets of American consumers.

P.s.

I often compare the military actions we have taken since World War II with WWII itself, as if that were the model of how we handled everything in the past — I realize, and perhaps sometimes conveniently forget, that throughout our history we have made various military interventions around the world, to include an unsuccessful one early in the last century into Mexico going after Pancho Villa, as well as sending troops to help put down the Boxer Rebellion in China, and our occupation of Haiti back in our own Hemisphere and other interventions. But I feel that simply using our military as a tool for international relations is generally not good (although as Madeline Albright quoted herself as saying in reference to opposition to intervention in Kosovo: what good is a military if we can’t use it? — I suppose she does have a point). I think we should do our best to practice what we preach — peace.

Nine Eleven was not Pearl Harbor; we made some missteps; Bush may have had one thing right, though

Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was not. But it was a tragedy, and I have come to think, maybe just today on its tenth anniversary, that President George W. Bush was at least partially right in his reactions to the event — maybe. But first:

Well 9/11 or 9-11-11 is all but a done deal now and thank goodness, as I write this, nothing yet. (Well actually there was an attack by the Taliban in the ongoing Afghan War over the last 24 hours, with many Americans — at least 77 – injured, but nothing in the homeland, as it has been called, particularly since 9/11 ).

I also want to interject here before I go further that regardless of what I think of the War on Terror I felt sad and outraged when I heard an interview on NPR in which a National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan said he got into a fight in a bar here at home when someone said to him: “your war doesn’t count”. This soldier, according to the interview, had been involved in going out and searching for IEDs and had suffered the shock of blasts from them more than once.

Its kind of chicken…t that we have this all-volunteer military and we can stand by and let them be sent hither and yon and into harm’s way but not even consider the policies that send them there because it does not affect our own life. Besides, the soldier does what he or she is supposed to do and if he or she was not available, each one of us might be subject to the call. And the soldier is separate from the government policy that puts him or her in harm’s way.

(There is the Nuremberg, I was only following orders thing, but I think the guilt rests with the higher ups, generally.)

But back to what I wanted to say on this tenth anniversary before it is over:

There has been a lot of comparison of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor. In fact those neocons who wanted us to go to war in the Middle East (again since Desert Storm) even had the audacity to wish on paper for another Pearl Harbor in their Project for a New American Century treatise.

But while it is spooky and almost a little too convenient that indeed we had a Pearl Harbor-like attack (it did come from the air), there are not really a lot of similarities, except about the same number of lost lives.

Pearl Harbor was an act of war by an identifiable nation — Japan. I don’t know if the Japanese admiral really said it, but in a movie account he is heard saying: “I am afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant”. Indeed the Japanese did. There was a strong isolationist feeling in America, right up until the Japs attacked. At that point the isolationist movement  died.

We had a fairly unified reaction to 9/11 but as the response dragged on and got muddled I think the public turned indifferent for the most part.

On 9/11 we were attacked by a stateless group of folks. It was staged, though, from Afghanistan where the group who would claim responsibility and calls itself Al Qaeda was being harbored along with its then leader Osama Bin Laden by the Taliban who controlled that nation. We demanded they turn over Bin Laden and they refused and we attacked. But as everyone knows, almost inexplicably our former president, George W. Bush, seemed to become half-hearted at that and turned his sights on Iraq, successfully conflating events there with 9/11 (it is well known he wanted an excuse to attack Iraq even before 9/11). While certainly the then leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was probably sympathetic with the aims of Al Qaeda, as far as them being against America, there is no evidence he had anything whatsoever to do with 9/11. Nonetheless we wound up attacking Iraq and making much more of a show of it there than Afghanistan until years later. We are still engaged in hostilities in both nations. And of course President Obama successfully ordered and got the killing of Bin Laden by our special military units, most notably the Navy SEALS.

But while the attack on Pearl Harbor was an act of clear aggression by an identifiable nation, and while Pearl Harbor pushed America into World War II against the Axis powers of Japan and Germany (and for a time Italy), and while congress officially declared war on the Axis powers, and while that war was budgeted and consumer goods became scarce and food was rationed in the war effort — none of those things took place for 9/11. And oh, yes, we, the U.S. and its allies, clearly won WWII. We went for complete victory to include unconditional surrender of the enemy.

Today we have no complete victory and no unconditional surrender and at times we don’t even know who the enemy is. Indeed the presidential authorizations to fight this war or wars seems to be against terrorism in general, as if you could declare war on a tactic or against evil itself.

Our constitution does not really tell us what to do in this instance. I don’t think the framers dreamed that one day we would have a president who would up and decide to wipe out all evil in the world by declaring war on it. And our wars in these modern times, especially since World War II, are just not fought in the same way.

In the end, we actually prospered from WWII and became the world’s leading economic and military power.

Today we are essentially going bankrupt due in large part to the War on Terror.

And we are no safer today, a trillion or more dollars and thousands of casualties later, after a decade, or at least it is hard to think we could be.

One of the more agonizing things about both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 is that in both cases we had warning. Pearl Harbor had actually been predicted back in the 1920s, even though it did not occur until 1941. A 9/11-type attack had also been predicted years ahead of time, despite the erroneous observation by Condoleezza Rice that no one ever thought such a thing might happen. We also had the very culprits who got on the airplanes and carried out the 9/11 attacks on a terrorist watch list, but it all got lost in the bureaucracy and interagency rivalry.

Some have even suggested that there was an inside conspiracy in both cases by people who wanted us to go to war. While I doubt that, I do think that the events handed them their cases on a silver platter and maybe some did look the other way at warnings hoping something might happen.

Twenty-twenty hindsight is easy, I admit. But we do need to reflect on what happened and how we handled it and see if we cannot come up with something better.

While I have always been critical of Bush for his actions, particularly his striking at Iraq, instead of concentrating on Afghanistan or even on just going after the actual perpetrators — the ones besides the ones that died in the attack of course — and their leader Bin Laden (it took another president to get that job done), I think he, Bush, had the right idea after all, maybe, in putting those who would attack America on notice that they could run, but they could not hide — we will get them.

We indeed did get Bin Laden (even if it took a decade), and we have killed scores of Al Qaeda leaders. I mean it has got to make some of these bad guys nervous that an unseen drone flying overhead could send a missile up their rear end at any moment.

I think we may have overdone things militarily, especially since we don’t seem to have the desire or stomach to actually defeat nations, occupy them for a time, and then make sure they fly right. We did so with Germany and Japan, but that was then and this is now.

I’m thinking drones, cloak and dagger, and keeping our mouths shut, and letting our actions speak louder than words, just might be the way to go.

But there still may come a time when it will be necessary to use our military in a more conventional sense. We have to have public support to make that effective. And we should not do so without it.

And although for much of today I was involved with my truck driving work, I did manage to catch some of the comments from folks who suffered on 9/11, who lost loved ones.

I felt terribly sad for them.

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ADD 1:

I just now recall that I heard a story the other day I think on NPR that the ten-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor was not marked in any special way for the most part because we were all into having our former foe Japan be on our side and be an important base for our operations against North Korea at the time, the Korean War being in progress.

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P.s.

Looking back in a more personal way in my own life, I recall that fateful day. My now late wife was in the hospital suffering from a mysterious illness. It was touch and go and I had been up late with her. At the time we were living with my mother. I was on leave (using vacation time) from my work. That morning I was sleeping in, having been up late at the hospital. My mom woke me up and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. News junkie that I am, normally I would have jumped up. But I was tired. But after I finally did get up, I saw the video of a jet crashing into one of the towers.  And I recall once the second plane hit, we instantly knew this was not a freak accident.

As it turned out, my wife would recover for the most part, but unfortunately she only had about nine years. She died just over a year ago.

Wished I could have made more of those nine years with her.

We should all make the best of things each day. Things like 9/11 happen, and even smaller every day tragedies occur too. None of us knows how long we have and how long we will share things with our loved ones.

The very suggestion Iraqis would now attack our troops makes my blood boil…

In my opinion our United States military should be for defense and defense only (or for emergency rescue or aid of the public), not as a tool of international policy, geopolitical strategy and intrigue.

It instantly made my blood boil when I read a story in the online Washington Post that Maryland National Guard troops readying to deploy to Iraq have to worry that if we are there past the deadline for us to be out of there they might be attacked by Iraqis (oh, and I also don’t think the National Guard should be sent overseas except in dire emergencies).

Part of me wants to say: how dare anyone in Iraq might suggest or do such a thing. And part of me wants to say: if they think our previous occupation was bad, just wait till we really take over.

Then again, part of me wants to say: we had no business being there in the first place, what did we expect?

Let’s stop the nation building and let’s pack up and come home.

I am not at all sure that the pre-World War II isolationists were so wrong. We goaded Japan into attacking us by cutting off their oil supply. Look what we do for oil nowadays.

Germany did not attack us (at the beginning of WWII). We tried to help right things in Europe in WWI, but the folks there just could not get along. So we had to pull their chestnuts (our allies) out of the fire once again in World War II.

The Germans were working on the atomic bomb. That would have been a problem. But maybe if we had not gotten into the war there would be no reason for them to develop the bomb and we could have developed it anyway. Maybe the Germans and Russians would have taken care of (destroyed) each other — others have suggested as much.

Fortress America may not have been such a bad idea.

I for one do not believe in one-world government.

The United States has used NATO (and the UN) as a cover in the past and most recently in Libya has let it go out in front. But I ask this: what happens if one of these multi-nation organizations of which we are a member decides it does not like what we are doing in this country and decides to take military action against us?

Cooperation among nations certainly is required for world peace, but a nation is not a nation when it gives up its sovereignty.

The story that provoked this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/mission-for-md-soldiers-unclear-with-iraq-exit-in-limbo/2011/09/02/gIQARxO5zJ_story.html?hpid=z4

Let’s keep America strong by staying right here and defending America.

(Sharia law for Libya?) Obama may have another Middle East victory: Bin Laden down and now Gaddafi

LATEST UPDATE (8-25-11):

At the the opera they say it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. In libya,  it can’t even begin to be over till Gaddafi crawls out of his hole or until he is pulled out. His loyalits are still resisting and he’s still issuing statements, according to reports, even though his command center/residence was taken over.

And one wonders if this will all devolve into a civil war.

UPDATE:

8-24-11

Over the last 12 hours or so the story/rumor that is circulating concerning the apparent Libya rebel victory over Gaddafi, who served as a tyrant for more than four decades, is that a draft of a new “democratic” constitution is circulating and that it calls for the imposition of  Sharia law.

I have to admit I know next to nothing about Sharia law, except basically I understand it is an Islamic religious code. Well if a nation is going to have an official religion, it seems logical it might well adopt that religion’s code.

I could no more deal with the imposition of Sharia law here in the United States than I could deal with the imposition of some Christian code of conduct based on the Old or even New Testament of the Holy Bible.

In the U.S., religious freedom, which includes the prohibition of a state-sponsored religion (and I would add, freedom from religion), is a fundamental part of our democracy. It would seem impossible to achieve anything close to our basic freedoms with the imposition of a religious law, even though much of our law is derived from religious moral codes of the past.

And that story or rumor about a pending imposition of Sharia law in Libya is just that, a story or rumor.

But again, my limited understanding is that there are various forms of Sharia law and that different people, that is different Muslims, interpret it differently.

Now that I think about it, Iraq, which we liberated and nation-built with so much cost in blood and treasure, now uses Sharia law. And so does our oil-rich “friend ” Saudi Arabia.

(From what little I do understand of Sharia it is not fun to be a woman where it is practiced, unless you like having no rights.)

While we have to hope that something good comes out of the Libya rebel cause, such as a Western-style democracy, I’m not sure it should make a lot of difference to any of us here in the Good Old USA. We have our democracy and a nice country — we need to take care of ourselves and let Libyans decide what they want to do.

And by the way, does it bother you as it does me when I see all those ignorant people shooting automatic weapons into the air in “celebratory fire”? BBC (a much better source of news than any of our outlets) did a little story on the dangers and the many deaths that idiot behavior causes.

Are those people really ready to take care of things for themselves?

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My previous post from 8-23-11 follows:

Maybe there is hope that the Libya thing won’t turn into an Iraqi/Afghanistan/Vietnam quagmire after all — we don’t know yet.

Unlike the Republicans, I freely admit or concede our President Obama is looking pretty clever right now. I was critical of his move and method on Libya, thinking that although we (the U.S.) went in there, by air power, under the cover of NATO, we would be left holding the bag and it would all turn into a messy civil war, as is or was the case in Iraq and/or a seemingly unwinnable fiasco as in Afghanistan.

I was right in that it takes ground troops — air alone would not likely topple Gaddafi — but the troops were indigenous rebels, the way it should be I would think.

As of this writing, Gaddafi has not been captured yet, but reports are that fighting is intense around his palace or compound, I guess they call it (I thought he lived in a tent), and smoke can be seen coming from his residence.

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UPDATE: Now at mid morning my time on the West Coast reports are that rebels have taken over his compound and have found some of his officially-stamped papers. No reports of Gaddafi’s capture yet. If he’s like Saddam Hussein, I’d day call Rotorooter.

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It’s almost laughable how the Republican candidates have to say they are happy Gaddafi is out or almost out but refuse to give Obama any credit.

I don’t even buy that it could have come quicker with more U.S. help — I mean maybe it could have, but I have to admit Obama was wise not to make this an American war. He also knew that he could not afford to get into still another ground war.

Of course no one knows what will happen now. It could still turn into complete chaos.

But for now, with the Obama-ordered killing of Osama Bin Laden by U.S. special operations and elite forces and now apparently the downfall of Gaddafi, I’d say Obama is looking pretty good.

But the economy here at home and the question of whether the Republicans can field an acceptable candidate, palatable to the bulk of American voters, will likely decide whether Obama gets a second term.

P.s.

I wonder what Assad in Syria is thinking about now.

Bin Laden raid may have provided answer to how to get out of the Middle East wars

If I just read it correctly, in the near future we will have another official holiday to observe, besides the Memorial Day weekend we are currently in. There is to be a day to honor those who have served or taken part in the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I’m seeing the handwriting on the wall that tells me sentiment is leaning heavily for ending our involvement over there (the Middle East).

A measure was narrowly defeated in the House the other day that was aimed at doing just that. Even the Republicans seem to be turning against what was the Bush war and now is Obama’s war.

If I were the cynical type I would say, okay fine, it was all well and good in the name of fighting for freedom and all that is precious when it was a Republican-led effort, but now that the first black president, and a Democrat at that, has embraced the war over there, the by gosh by jingo lets fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here folks are having second thoughts.

But in fact, I think save for a little excitement in the beginning, the public at large — not the families of soldiers — has been largely indifferent to the whole thing. One big reason is there is no draft. Young men (and women) do not have to worry about being called up to die for a questionable cause and parents don’t have to worry that their children will be yanked from them to become cannon fodder.

Even those who normally equate everything our nation does militarily (especially if there is a Republican president) as immune from criticism are having second thoughts, I think.

It’s the cost man. The U.S. has spent more than a trillion dollars in a near decade-long military effort in the Middle East and keeps spending billions per month, but cannot figure out if or when it can win or has already won (probably not on that last one) and cannot figure out how to stop or get out. And now the U.S. is facing the equivalent of bankruptcy we are told with the prospect it (we) will be forced to default on debt (bond) payments. While some of that threat is political theatre used as leverage to force changes in social policies, most of it is certainly real, I would think. And since the dollar is what we and the world depend upon, a default could not be good, to say the least.

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UPDATE:

So several days after posting this I found the figure I was looking for. According to a story in the Washington Post the U.S. is set to spend $113 billion this year alone on the Afghanistan war and is proposing to spend $107 billion the next fiscal year.

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To simply quit would seem to add one to the loss column, as in Vietnam, not only casting shame on us all and making a mockery out of the sacrifices of our soldiers, but making us look weak in the face of our enemies, emboldening them to strike us in ever newer and deadlier ways.

And the fear is that if we leave, militant Islam would fill the void and be in a stronger position to defeat the U.S.

But maybe the Bin Laden hit has provided an answer.

Maybe that is what we should have been doing all along, that is going after the perpetrators, rather than destroying peoples’ homes and livelihoods and nations and making new enemies in the process.

Modern technology and its rapid speed transportation and communication is a two-way street.

On the one hand, it made 9/11 possible. It allowed a shadowy underground of terrorists to make an enormous deadly strike on the world’s only remaining super power.

But it also allows that super power to strike back in surgical fashion as in the Bin Laden raid, giving proof to good old George W. Bush’s use of that old saying (was in from Joe Louis?) “you can run, but you can’t hide” (well you actually can hide and quite well for a long time, in plain sight even, but we will eventually get you).

Let’s bring the troops home and really have a celebration.

Let’s spend those trillions of dollars to pay off the national debt and provide health care for all and to revitalize our industry which made us strong to begin with.

P.s.

And yes, in honor of Memorial Day let us all take some time to look back and appreciate the sacrifices others made in the name of freedom (regardless if the policies that put  them there, and over which they had little to no control, made sense).

P.s. P.s

President Barack Obama really ought to be called out on his Libya involvement. It does seem to have violated both the Constitutional war provisions and the War Powers Act (although I confess I have not researched this; I’m just going on what others have said or written). I guess some are hedging in case the Libyan adventure were to turn out to be successful.

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And one more thing here: I have been having computer problems and have not been able to post as much as I would prefer. Believe me, I have not been without things to comment on.

Shades of Vietnam and even Somalia in Libyan crisis…

Pretending a war is not a war and suggesting that regime change was not the goal, when of course it was, has only served to move the Libya action into a stalemate (if you can’t even admit to yourself what you are trying to do, how can you be successful?).

And shades of Vietnam, but this time the British and the Italians and the French, not the United States, yet, are going to send military advisors in to help the rebel forces. I think the last I read is that the Obama administration is still maintaining no U.S. ground troops will be sent in. Would that be like Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous quote that he would not “send American boys in to do what Vietnamese boys should do for themselves”? And then he of course committed a half million troops, almost 60,000 dead, thousands gravely wounded for life, and you know the rest.

It does not seem, fortunately, this time around that there is much chance of that, at least not for the United States. I can’t imagine the electorate countenancing another all-out war, with at least one and half going on now. I would think everyone is concerned about events in Libya causing gasoline prices to spike moving into the $4-per gallon-plus and toward 5 and higher (due not to supply but the usual speculation in the market during crises — always a good opportunity for providers of oil-based fuels to jack up the profits), and if the face of that keeping themselves afloat in a stagnant economy (for the bulk of us). If we were being attacked sacrifice for survival would instantly be the order of the day.

But that begs the question as to why we are involved at all (little to gain, everything to lose).

There is some hope that the continued pressure on the Gaddafi regime by the NATO air assaults (under a UN resolution) and from the rebels on the ground might force those around Gaddafi to force him out to save their own skins — but it is not happening a month into this thing, and it is still unclear whether Gaddafi can’t actually hang on anyway.

Following the Vietnam syndrome, one of these advisers will get shot at — gee how strange in a war zone — and then there will be the call to send in the troops for real. Actually as I recall, what happened in Vietnam is that the U.S. had advisors on the ground for years and was not getting anywhere. And then we began air assaults and introduced a limited number of Marines to guard airbases, and wouldn’t you know? in a war zone they got fired at. So we sent in the whole shebang and got nowhere after a decade (that is the danger in third parties getting involved in essentially civil wars).

If the NATO coalition forces go the troops-on-the-ground route, it would seem that Obama would be pressured to send in his own commitment.

Trouble is, I don’t recall the United States ever taking a second banana-role in a military adventure. We’re just too big for that.

We should get out and stay out of Libya and not get sucked into what one pundit labeled the Vietmalia Syndrome, combining the Vietnam and Somalia fiascos (Somalia of course minor compared to Vietnam) in which there seems no great public support or interest and where there seems no way out (especially judging from recent history).

In my previous blogs I have suggested that Obama is wrong both on committing us at all to Libya and since he did, then not going all out. Maybe he is doing something right in that he is letting some of the Western European powers, most notably Britain and France, carry more of the burden, since they seem to have such a keen interest in Libya.

Maybe Gaddafi can be squeezed out, but right now it is looking like military ground action is the more likely route.

It was while fighting on this very ground, North Africa, to include Libya, where the Allies in World War II made the decision that total defeat and total surrender of Germany, which they were battling in the deserts of North Africa, would be pursued.

Strangely it seems as if liberals support the Libya action more than conservatives, even though liberals are usually tagged as military wimps. But that was kind of the case before we got into World War II. The liberals saw it as a fight between human rights and democracy and fascism and Nazism (right-wing autocratic ideologies).

American conservatives of course support democracy and the right of the individual but sometimes have a strange fascination for strong, very strong, leaders who can keep the rabble, who they fear might get some of their money and property, in line.

In the current Libya case, though, Republican conservatives don’t quite know how to play it. They don’t like Gaddafi any more than anyone else, but they don’t see any political gain from a war in Libya just now, and they would not want to be supporting a Democratic president in anything if they don’t have to (especially with the 2012 presidential election looming large). They criticized Obama for not moving fast enough on Libya and then said he overreached his power by committing American naval and air forces.

Right now, too, it’s back to the Bill Clinton idea of “it’s the economy stupid” that is on everyone’s mind. Libya seems to have fallen off the news cycle for the most part.