Winning a Battle; Losing a War
By any measure, this sort of reckless command decision is badly flawed.
After trying to buy Bin Laden’s capture from guys who let him escape, holding hundreds captive for years before releasing them for lack of evidence, you’d think the military brass would learn to be skeptical of its Afghani informants. But no. A few have learned nothing about how razing the village saves nothing and only builds an ultimately successful resistance movement. As well, they seem oblivious to the past record of Afghanistan bogging down superior armies, so they stumble forward, adding injury to insult.
And changing the deficient military brass won’t impress the resistance, either.
This is the most valid war our country’s fought since WW2 against the Taliban that protected US attackers before and after 9-11. And the mishandling of the fight runs all the way up to the Commander In Chief, who’ll retire as a failure in the central battle in the fight against Al Qaida.
But the record’s pretty clear: Republican presidents haven’t won a fight larger than Grenada in the memory of anyone under 100. Outside of that epic battle, they had to leave a madman in power in 1991, wait for sanctions to wither his military before taking him out a dozen years later and squander even that with Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and the emergence of a Shia majority more aligned with Iran’s interests than our own.
All this, from the political party touted as strong on defense. It’s so obvious that the majority of the grunts tasked with the hardest fighting are voting Democratic this year. And somewhere in Pakistan, US public enemy numbers 1 and 2 are high-fiving at the utter ineptness of the Cowboy from Crawford, who keeps shooting our country in its foot.
