Daily Archives: December 3, 2009

Is there really any difference?

Guest correspondent Joe Pyloric here.

Well, the cheerleaders got what they wanted, and the rest of us were left shaking our heads after Generalissimo Obama’s televised speech from West Point last Tuesday.  In a carefully choreographed routine that left listeners, for the most part, hearing what they wanted to hear, Obama is now off and running with “Barry’s War”.

It is no longer GW’s war, or anyone else’s for that matter.  Generalissimo Obama is now driving this train wreck that will bear his name.  I would only hope that he also delivers the telegrams to the countless families that will be affected by his decision.  His decision, by the way, was to hike up the hip waders and plod further into Afghanistan with another 30,000 troops.

The mission?  To show the Taliban and Al Queda that we mean business and will not tolerate them using that particular rock pile to do their training or make their plans.  Of course we are dealing with an enemy that is too stupid to take those missions to Somalia or North Korea or Iraq or Syria or any number of other places, aren’t we?  There are plenty of cells operating inside the U.S. as well.  Let’s see, if the bad guys know it will be getting too hot to do business in Afghanistan in about a year, why not let the big bully spend his money, build up his troops, and run around exploring empty caves while they plan and finance their next stage of operations?

But, let’s remember what all of his supporters are hanging on to – that he has an exit strategy, or does he?  That he will start bringing troops home in about 18 months.  Don’t hold your breath.  He really didn’t address the exit strategy very much, and he could keep from being a liar if he just brought one soldier home in 2011, right?  More importantly, he didn’t rule out even more deployments in the future.

He really didn’t put much substance into his actual on-the-ground strategy.  Just like Vietnam (remember that one?), many of those troops are not front-line fighters, but the entire support system to dig in to a country, everything from kitchen staff to paper pushers, as if there aren’t enough of those in Washington.  Let’s hope there are a lot of pens available for signing defense contracts.

And how about the “why” of the whole process?  Why are we there in the first place, and why are we continuing to sink more resources into something that is not showing results?  And why was this the only course of action that made sense to the idiots in Washington who have never run a business or fought a war up close and personal?

I wonder if any consideration – any at all – was given to the idea to just pack up, bring all of our soldiers home, and leave Afghanistan in the Stone Age?  We tell them we will start to get out in 18 months, but they have no concept of time or calendars.

Once again, we have chosen to wage a war that we would like to be fought in what is now an antiquated style, convincing ourselves that we have the superior forces, more firepower, more highly trained personnel, and  more money that our enemy, whoever that may be.  If they walked by us, could we tell?

The Generalissimo has decreed that by a stroke of his pen, we will prevail over an enemy we can’t see and in truth have no idea who he is.  For the record, we are dealing with an enemy who will sleep between rocks for weeks at a time, who is often fighting because someone is paying him to fight and that is the only job available, an enemy who only understands that there are people who look like space men running around trying to kill him, but if he kills them he will keep living, but if perchance he dies he will go off to meet all those virgins in the sky.

It only gets more complicated from here on out.  Anyone who thinks that putting 30,000 more American kids at risk will have a happy ending, please go walk off the cliff with the rest of your friends.