Coming, Possibly, To A Place Near You, Maybe

This is absolutely Doubleplus Ungood.

I'm so glad that during the reign of Lil' Boots, we spent the majority of our military assets and time attacking the heart of Al-Qaeda's terrorist network in Afghanistan, getting the (compromised) Pakistani government to cooperate in eliminating Al-Qaeda and Taliban elements in the wild northern provinces of that country.

I'm also very glad that we made good on Lil' Boots' 2002 promises to rebuild Afghanistan's infrastructure with public works and civic improvement projects -- so that the population would turn away from tribal factionalism, and destroy the single greatest recruitment tool the Taliban had -- because a higher standard of living and a stable central government was better than, say, subsistence living just above the Stone Age, in an ignorant, murderously male-dominated culture that puts a religious gloss on revenge and brutality.

Oh; wait. Um, yeah... Lil' Boots and his buddies didn't do any of that. So now, the Taliban are as great a threat as they ever were; Osama and his buddies are as much of a threat or worse than they were before 9/11; Afghanistan is still a huge center of Opium production and its infrastructure still in ruins dating from the invasion by the Russians in the 1970's.

Oh -- and all this, when public attitudes towards any continuing military involvement are negative (remember, we've been Over There for eight years). Lil' Boots wore out the whole gotta defend Freedom! From th' terraists! argument, mainly because he lied to the country to take us to war against Iraq when the real threat was elsewhere...

So now, we have to try and fight the real war, almost from scratch -- the one we should have been fighting all along, but that wasn't profitable for the right-wing scum that were running the show in the previous eight years. A war with more American dead and wounded; small wonder people aren't in favor of sending additional troops. Everyone knows the invasion of Iraq was unnecessary, a lie; and now, finally, we have to face the real threat, there's no support for the decision of the central government.

It's just a small opinion of mine, but I sometimes think: Each cycle that the Right Wing is in power, there's a slice of them that wants the Federal government to appear as corrupt and incompetent as possible, forcing the Democrats and Liberals to spend years trying to repair the damage done to the country, if not the world.

The end result is that the idea of a central, Federal government responsible to its people -- the key idea of a representative democracy -- is tarnished each time the Rightists do this. And (they're hoping), some day the American public will just turn their back on any government, at all... much like Italy, where a figurehead government prattles and stews, nothing works, and the country is actually run by an Oligarch like Berlusconi who treats the country as his private playground and ATM, giving other Capos the chance to wet their beaks.

And, now, America's broke. It isn't impossible, by starting Islamist brushfire wars in Malaya, Indonesia, Thailand, Somalia, Ethiopia, Africa, and pushing Pakistan and Afghanistan's secular governments to the brink until one of them snaps, that Osama and his buddies will do to us what the Taliban and the CIA once did to the Soviet Union: Bankrupt us and force us to retract our military within our own borders, while they build their psychotic dream of a fundamentalist Islamic Caliphate.



But, hey -- Haliburton and Blackwater made serious bank in Iraq, huh? A lot of investors did very very well, and a lot of executives got very nice bonuses. And, Fat Boy Rush and Little Mikey Weiner got to shout and bark and vomit; and Little Rupert's media empire just got bigger and bigger, like Pinocchio's nose. And, as a result of eight years and over 4,000 American dead (not to mention 200,000 - 500,000 dead Iraqis), the people of Iraq are now about half an hour away from civil war free! And may end up victimized by their own Islamic terror state loving freedom! So, it's all good; right?

Right? Um; Yeah. Sure.

Hope Lil'Boots remembers that, when and if Al-Qaeda ever gets its hands on one of Pakistan's nukes -- that his arrogant stupidity and greed made it possible.

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