So we have a bit of an anniversary today, the anniversary of the day, ten years ago, when Arab, mostly Saudi Arabian, terrorists hijacked 4 jets and flew three of them into buildings, killing over 3000 people.
Thus began what was to be called the Global War On Terror.
And in the intervening 10 years life has changed for Americans.
Like the billions of dollars that were lost on the stock market that very week, one of Osama bin Laden’s stated objectives. He knew it is all about the money.
Like the trillions of dollars that were flushed down the toilet in an unnecessary Iraq War.
Like the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost merely be being in the crossfire.
Like going through airport metal detectors in your stocking feet.
Like full body scans and aggressive pat downs.
Like the Patriot Act, an act that was and is a singular attack on American constitutional rights.
Like state-sanctioned eavesdropping on any and all communications.
Like mindless attacks on anyone who looks like they might be from the Middle East (or even India), or who might be a Muslim.
Like the thousands of young American and British lives lost in a war started for no existing rhyme or reason, and the tens of thousands physically and mentally scarred.
911 was an event that caused Americans to rally around a president who then took that support and ran America over a cliff. Osama bin Laden might be fish bait now, or worse, but there is no doubt in my mind that the plans that were hatched 10 years ago today were wildly successful in their ultimate effect.
It changed America and Americans, probably forever.
This is what Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told CNN’s Farid Zakaria on Farid Zakaria GPS this afternoon:
"We are not going to win this war just by staying. My own judgment is, quite frankly, that we are not going to ever defeat the insurgency. We have to have an Afghan government that is capable of managing that insurgency and improving its own governance.”
I’ve been wondering about that myself.
Historically, no one has ever had much success getting Afghans to knuckle under to foreign rule.
Most recently, we had the Soviet Union armies see defeat in Afghanistan. Some argue that they lost their will in their defeat by Afghan Mujahideen fighters, and this contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
Sure the Soviets were ultimately defeated by the US and Middle East nations helping and arming the Afghan Mujahideen.
But it took 10 years.
And the Mujahideen never let up.
Before that we had the English. The English fought three wars in Afghanistan between 1839 and 1919 and in the end, in 1919, they left, ceding back all of the territories that they had controlled.
As a matter of fact, war is part and parcel of Afghan history. As the PM observed, Afghan insurgency is historically a way of life there.
So in the end, I find myself in agreement with PM Harper. Afghans have time and the terrain on their side. All we can really hope for is to have a stable government in Kabul. A government whose legitimacy will be constantly questioned as long as we have a single pair of boots on the ground there.
In other words, the best thing we can do for the government in Afghanistan is to get out and stay out.
Yes, President Obama is dead wrong to increase our presence there. He has listened to the wrong people, and has accepted their ill-advised opinions.
Now if there hasn’t been a reason not to vote for John McCain in some peoples’ minds, maybe there is now. Maybe young men between the ages of 19 and 26 will think again about pushing in that pin, pulling that lever or bubbling in that circle for John McCain.
Because John McCain has in his own inimitable way, admitted that he agrees with the notion of reinstituting the military draft.
Not only young men, mind you. What about parents and grand parents of these young men?
Now here is a You Tube video showing McCain at a town hall meeting in Las Cruces, where he made this admission:
Now a McCain spokesman put out a statement a day later categorically denying that McCain supports bringing back the draft.
Yet when you look at how McCain replied to his questioner, you do have to wonder if that is true. Outside of the draft comment the questioner didn’t present anything for McCain to agree to except for her observations about how veterans are being treated and what will that mean for future military recruitment quotas. The gist of her question was given how we treat veterans, how will we be able to kill or capture Osama bin Laden if there are fewer and fewer recruits. Given all of that, the commenter observed “If we don’t reenact the draft, I don’t think we’ll have anyone to chase Bin Laden to the gates of hell.” And you all saw what McCain's reply was.
“Ma’am, let me say that I don’t disagree with anything you said.”
Now that’s a double negative which we educators hate because the meaning becomes hazy, which was probably McCain’s intent. So let me redact his reply, excising the double negative:
Ma’am, let me say that I agree with everything you said.
He went on to quote George Washington who, in 1789 observed this: those who sign up for military service in the future will do so based upon how they see the country treat its present-day soldiers.
So you see, he is not agreeing with the woman’s observations about how shabbily our veterans are being treated, he is agreeing with the woman’s major premise, that this will impact the numbers of future volunteers.
Reinstituting the draft is just a small, very small, leap in logic.
And remember, McCain is on record as saying that he would consider reinstituting a draft that is fair. In a September 27, 2007 New Hampshire town hall meeting, he said this:
“There has never been a draft that I have ever heard of, since World War II that was fair. What we’ve done is we find rich people find a way out and lower income people are the ones that serve. So, if you could design . . . I might consider it . . . I don’t think it’s necessary . . .but I might consider it if you could design a draft where everybody equally would serve. But it just doesn’t happen.”
So now we have a quote from McCain agreeing that having a military draft may be necessary, and the only way we will send Osama bin Laden to the nether regions, and one saying that he might consider a draft if it is fair.
So I really don’t think they can argue their way out of this one, I really don’t. So rather than try to do just that, they categorically deny that he meant what we all heard him say.
Fancy that. A Republican denying what is plainly the truth.
Oh, and by the way, speaking of getting out of the draft, need I again remind everyone that Texas’ junior US Senator, John Cornyn, is one of those people that finagled a way out of being drafted? While thousands of his age mates put it on the line and had their birthdays pulled out of a spinning drum, John Cornyn took advantage of a poorly understood and largely unannounced loophole in the selective service act that still allowed students to file for 2S student deferments even after the lottery was instituted.
I took my chances on the lottery, and my number was 296. Cornyn didn’t. When he and hundreds of other young men born on February 2, 1952 drew number 28, Cornyn stayed home while others went to war.
Oh, but that’s OK, he more than made up for this by voting against providing body armor to our soldiers in Iraq.
McCain and Cornyn: Two John’s we don’t need in DC anymore.
This is something that sends chills up your spine. Eleven Pakistani soldiers are now dead because of a failure to communicate. But the video from the drone in this You Tube clip must have had about 90 out of 100 pixels sheared off of it before it was released for public consumption. You can’t tell this taxpayer that the government supplies to its troops video equipment for surveillance that you could have bought at Circuit City - - - ten years ago. I don’t know about you, but this video footage does nothing to help me understand what happened.
And I guess that is just another aspect of “the fog of war”.
The New York Times has just released Justice Department letters stating the government’s official opinion on the torturing of prisoners, vis-à-vis the Geneva Convention, illuminating for the first time the rationale behind still-secret CIA interrogation rules.
It seems, according to the Justice Department, that how you interrogate a prisoner very much depends on who the prisoner is, and how desirable is the information they hope to extract. Once a prisoner is classified as a “terrorist”, new rules apply. If the person is deemed to possess information that is considered important, new rules apply. From The Times:
“‘The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act,’ said Brian A. Benczkowski, a deputy assistant attorney general, in the letter, which had not previously been made public.”
Torture, then is OK when it is done on someone in order to extract desirable information on future terror attacks, but not OK when the whole idea is to inflict humiliation on prisoners, or to generally abuse them.
In other words, if you are inflicting pain on a prisoner because of it gives one some sadistic pleasure, that’s bad. Only when you hope to get some useful information is it justified.
And the prisoner must be labeled a terrorist. That seems to be an important element of the opinions.
The casual observer would wonder what is the harm in that? Isn’t that a reasonable approach in a terrorist situation?
The problem is one of definition. One nation’s “terrorist” is another nation’s “freedom fighter”. Were the Minutemen of Massachusetts terrorists? Were the Sandinistas? What about the soldiers and militias that have put into power several African governments? If we go about labeling each and every person who takes up arms against America or any sovereign government, terrorists, especially when they are fighting on their own soil, it at least calls into question America’s credibility. At most, it gives each and every future adversary of the United States a rationale for torture of our own soldiers.
Something that the signatories of the Geneva Convention hoped to avoid.
Senator Ron Wyden (D - Oregon), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems to agree with this assessment:
“If the United States used subjective standards in applying its interrogation rules, he said, then potential enemies might adopt different standards of treatment for American detainees based on an officer’s rank or other factors. ‘The cumulative effect in my interpretation is to put American troops at risk,’ Mr. Wyden said.“
I guess the next time we hear about our troops being abused at the hands of their captors (and that day will come, as it has now been guaranteed) we will all know who to blame: George Bush and his malignant Department of Justice.
With us or agin’ us? I recall several years back in Bush’s speech on the War on Terror that if a country wasn’t with America on this, then they were “with the Terrorists”. Well a lot of water has gone under the bridge since that speech, and it would appear that not only is the vast majority of Americans “with the Terrorists” but also nearly every country in the world – I can’t speak for Rwanda, haven’t heard how they feel about the War.
But now, today I see two conflicting reports about Pakistan and I want to know which is the correct one. According to this White House publication, the US and Pakistan are BFF
“Pakistan: Three years ago, Pakistan was one of the few countries in the world that recognized the Taliban regime, and al-Qaida was active and recruiting in Pakistan without serious opposition. Yet the United States was not on good terms with Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders – the very people we would need to help shut down al-Qaida operations in that part of the world. Today, the United States and Pakistan are working closely in the fight against terror, and Pakistani forces are rounding up terrorists along their nation’s western border. President Musharraf is a friend of our country, who helped us capture Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner behind the 9/11 attacks. Today, because we are working with Pakistani leaders, Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror, and the American people are safer.”
Well this ally had some pretty harsh words today on the news that the United States could take action inside Pakistan. To this news, White House homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said "There are no tools off the table, and we use all our instruments of national power to be effective."
Basically it comes from a NIE by Mike McConnell, Bush’s National Security Advisor, the gist of it is found in this quote from McConnell:
“Instead of pushing Al Qaeda out, the people who live in these federally administered tribal areas [in Pakistan], they made a safe haven for training and recruiting. And so, in that period of time, Al Qaeda has been able to regain some of its momentum.”
A Pakistani official, Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao, was righteously pissed off at this.
“Our stance is that Osama bin Laden is not present in Pakistan. If anyone has the information he should give it to us, so that we can apprehend him.”
Chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad chimed in as well:
“Pakistani forces are quite capable of conducting operation(s) against militants on their territory and only they have the authority to do so.”
So we have a curious friendship here, one that can be best summed up by an ancient Nigerian proverb
“Hold a true friend with both your hands”.
Why is this so applicable? Well, I have to add this little addendum to the end of the proverb to make it make some sense:
