Thursday, September 2, 2021:  How Can We Claim The Moral High Ground When We Have Texas?

Watching what is happening in Texas with the voting laws and the abortion restrictions, I am having a hard time understanding how we can find fault with the Taliban in Afghanistan. How are Texas republicans (a.k.a. the Christian Taliban) any different? Their goal is to restrict democracy so they can stay in power, suppress a women's right to choose, and carry automatic weapons. They already have their pickup trucks, now the men need to start wearing Keffiyehs instead of baseball caps, mount 50 caliber machine guns to the beds of their trucks and add rocket propelled grenades to their arsenal.


Wednesday, September 1, 2021:  The Truth About Afghanistan

Much is being written about Afghanistan - America's longest war. There is certainly plenty to criticize about why we entered into the war in the first place, how we prosecuted it in the intervening years, and now how we extricated ourselves from it. But for those of us who lived through the Vietnam era and fought in that war, it was clear that Afghanistan was headed down the same doomed path. At the top of both failures is a combination of corporate avarice and American hubris.

The idea that American democracy, if there really is such a thing, is the preeminent form of government and adaptable to every socioeconomic situation is at the core of most of our military engagements since WWII.

Here is the reality of Afghanistan and it was the same for Vietnam. Neither war was winnable. In 1968, I attended a seminar at Ft. Sill in Oklahoma on Vietnam as part of my military training. The underlying theme was that it was not a winnable war. The best we could hope for was to create a stalemate militarily that would last long enough for a political solution to develop and take hold. But anybody who was following South Vietnam's politics understood that we were backing a corrupt government that would never be able to win over the hearts and minds of the people they were expected to govern. Democracy was going to fail.

The same was true for Afghanistan. It was never going to be a winnable war. Yes, we could create a military stalemate. Could the Afghani government we were backing run the country? Nope. It fell apart in days.

So hubris got us into the war, but what really drove us to continue to spend American tax dollars on a war that we could not win? Avarice my friends… There was money to be made.... Lots of money.

Wars are a boon for the military industrial complex. As the Army "lifers" would say about Vietnam, "it ain't much of a war, but it's the only one we got, and it's how you make grade." But Vietnam was cheap by comparison. Adjusted for inflation, Vietnam cost a tad over $850 billion. Afghanistan cost us $2 Trillion or $300 million a day for 20 years. The military/industrial complex loved it. Your tax dollars and mine getting flushed down the war toilet with people like Betsy DeVos's brother, Erik Prince, becoming billionaires by sucking on the other end of the sanitary sewer line. In fact, the whole fucking system is morally bankrupt and that is what has cost the lives of thousands of American's finest men and women – not the concept of global democracy that we tout. Can you imagine how much good we could have done over the last 20 years by spending that $2 Trillion here in the U.S.?