Infinite Buzz Saws

The first thing to note is that this was a political CYA (cover your ass) speech. Any war continues to be deeply unpopular with Obama's base. Hence, he needed to make the point that an escalation of the war effort in Afghanistan must be seen as an exit strategy. It's actually a tactical mistake (and I am not the first to say this) to tell the enemy when we’ll be leaving. That's much is obvious. The WH spin will be that it will force Karzai's hand into cooperating more fully with us. This should have been discussed with Karzai privately.

Now, all this is sure to signal the Taliban that they have already won; that our sole concern is that they hold off their murderous celebrations till after we've had our next presidential elections. It also ensures that, from now on, no one in Afghanistan will cooperate with us, knowing full well that after we're gone, they will be murdered if they’ve had anything to do with us.

Back in Pol Pot's day (in Cambodia), all those found wearing glasses and all those found with books in their houses were summarily shot. In our inner cities, all those with good school grades are bullied and ostracized by their peers. In the Palestinian Territories, everyone knows that anyone harboring ideas of peace with Israel and being vocal about it or having in any way participated in any U.S. or Israeli attempt to bring peace to the region will result in their families being threatened with extreme violence. In our Universities, anyone not viewing the world through a leftist prism automatically fails. The same principle applies to Afghanistan: all those who are found as having had anything at all to do with U.S. sponsored 'nation building' are guaranteed to meet their end.

Pervez Musharraf, former Pakistan strongman, actually wrote a good editorial in this morning’s WSJ. He said that for a nation to change, it must do so from within. This notion opened my eyes to some extent. Too often, we equate strategic advantage on the battlefield – winning, if you wish – with ancillary matters such as human or women’s rights. We abhor Sharia law; we abhor their proclivity to slaughter animals in the most brutal ways. We swoon at their beheading and disemboweling their enemies. Often we tend to define victory also in terms of their changing their ways to conform to our own sensibilities. Yet this is the precisely the part that they can’t stomach about us. It is why they will fight to the death against us.

The last war we fought for all the right reasons was for Kuwait. One country had invaded another in a blatant display of aggression. We drove the aggressor back and left the aggrieved parties to clean up the mess, each in its own way. Since then, we’ve become involved in nation-building and we’ve failed miserably on all counts. Unless we accept the concept that Paul Harvey repeated so often and so eloquently, that "it is not one world”, we will run into infinite buzz saws of never ending trouble. …the very same trouble, by the way, that Obama and his ilk are likely to face in trying to re-make America into something it is not.