Barack Obama: Warrior

I didn’t vote for my President, Barack Obama, because I thought he would be a great “War President.” I actually voted for him because I thought he would make a spectacular “Peace President.”

A Peace President to bring two wars to an end.

A Peace President to bring our troops home alive and safe.

A Peace President who will bring an end to all the death and maiming.

Not so. Not so at all. It turns out that my President, Barack Obama, has demonstrated his skills in conducting war that is far superior, in terms of results, than the guy he succeeded.

After all, he brought an end to the life of America’s biggest enemy, Osama bin Laden. His skills in statesmanship helped to bring about the end of two oppressive dictatorships in the Middle East.

Which is ironic considering Republicans have always tagged Democrats as peaceniks.

True in my case.

But not true with Barack Obama. Obama makes George W. Bush look like a liberal sob sister. Obama has overseen a record number of bomb runs by remote control drones in Pakistan (which we are not at war with).

So, yeah, if I sound disillusioned at my President, you have it right. I though he was made of softer stuff. But what I absolutely disdain is the Republican take on my President’s warrior status.

Even when he acts like them, Republicans simply will not give him his due.

6 Vote Shy of Mission Accomplished

I was amazed to learn this evening that an amendment to a military appropriations bill in the House, HR 1540 offered by Congressman McGovern came to  within 6 votes of passage today.

And what was McGovern’s amendment?

It was an amendment to finally and once and for all end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan, and to bring our troops home.

It was an amendment that recognizes what we have all come to realize, that the goals for going into Afghanistan have all been met. The Taliban is out of power, al-Qaeda has but a handful of individuals in Afghanistan – certainly not enough to make much of an impact, and Osama bin Laden is now fish food.

Mission creep is what has kept us there. Constant redefinition of why we fight.

Afghanistan will always be what it was – a backward nation where warlords and corruption are the rule rather than the exception. Why fix something that has not worked since Alexander the Great tried his hand at taming this beast?

But we came within 6 votes of ending this whole mess. 6 votes.

Republicans mostly voted against the amendment, naturally. They had 8 Democrats voting with them. Ironically, Democrats who voted for the amendment had 26 Republican voting with them. And all we needed was 6 more votes.

12 congressmen, 6 on each side, declined to vote. One of them was Gabrielle Giffords who pretty much doesn’t vote on anything thanks to that maniac in Tucson. But some of the others were definitely in the room.

Oh, and how did my congressman, Pete Olson, vote on this? No of course.

Here is what I say. The next soldier who dies in Afghanistan, and I hope this doesn’t happen but I know it will, the next soldier who dies, well Pete Olson gets to be the person responsible for his death. Not the guy who built the IED, or buried it. Not the guy who pulled the trigger or launched the RPG. Not him. Not them.

Pete Olson gets to be blamed for that death.

Iraq War Ends; Roger Clemens Is Innocent

Did you ever wonder why we Americans tolerated a 7.5 year war, a pointless fabricated war in Iraq?

Well here is the answer.

On the very day that the last combat battalion in Iraq crossed the border into Kuwait – from whence they came – Houston Astros star ballplayer Roger Clemens’ lawyer, Rusty Hardin, got media coverage concerning his client’s innocence for taking performance enhancing drugs.

Steroids.

And this, and not the end of combat operations in the illegal and immoral war in Iraq is front page news on the Houston Chronicle.

God, sometimes (no, more than most times) I hate where I live.

It’s Decoration Day

Or as we call it now, Memorial Day.

Originally May 30th was the day that people decorated the graves of Union soldiers in memory of their sacrifice in that human meat grinder called The Civil War.

Michigan was first to make Decoration Day a state holiday in 1871 but by 1890 all northern states celebrated the occasion.

The South had its own Memorial Day and it really wasn’t until after World War I added to the list of soldiers to be remembered that America had a unified Decoration Day, although because the Civil War so dominated the day, veterans of The Great War (as we called it before we learned to number them) wanted their own day of remembrance, giving us Armistice Day.

It’s the first time in quite some time that Memorial Day falls on the actual originally intended day of May 31st. This is because Congress decided to give everyone a 3-day weekend in 1971 and voted to have it fall on the last Monday in May.

I suspect it was to keep more kids in school because when May 31st fell on Tuesday or Thursday the temptation among parents to haul their kids out of school for an extra day at the onset of summer was just too great.

It’s also the day we celebrate mass consumption of really expensive fuel as Formula 1 cars race each other for 500 miles by going around and around a track in Indianapolis.

And finally, it’s a day we reserve to fire yet another shot across President Obama’s bow as neoconservatives on the airwaves rant and rave over how Barack Obama is slighting our fallen heroes by not laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery.

In which I have to ask, what is so special about Arlington? Are more importantly dead soldiers found there?

Or does it just so happen that Arlington National Cemetery and the White House are conveniently close to each other?

Oh, and then there is the thing about Memorial Day marking the beginning of summer, something that I mistakenly thought happened on June 21st.

And finally, oh yes, Memorial Day is a day set aside where we honor the service and sacrifice of men and women who paid the ultimate price by dying in war. A price that makes my blood boil lately knowing what I know about how the War in Iraq was a pure fabrication on the part of Dick Cheney, and that the War in Afghanistan, a war whose purpose was to end Taliban rule in Afghanistan, had it’s principal mission completely accomplished 8 years ago.

So in honor of these soldiers, let’s not make more fallen heroes to remember on Memorial Day, OK?

Bring them home. Now.

On Ending War in the Middle East

I started this blog a little over 3 years ago with an aim to add my voice to the growing throng who wanted to stop Bush’s illegal and immoral war in Iraq. My premise was, and has always been, that the very presence of American military in Middle East countries was reason enough for the Islamic world to take up arms against America.

Indeed, the presence of American troops in Osama Bil Laden’s own country’s capitol city, Riyadh, during the first Gulf War, was enough to set him off on a path that ultimately led to the 9/11 massacres.

We are Infidels.

To the Muslim world, we, through our troops, represent the very ideals that led the Crusaders to conquer Jerusalem and “the Holy Land.”

And the best way to recruit more devout Muslims to the cause of Islamic extremism is to continue a military presence in the Middle East. In their countries.

But here we are, still engaged in Iraq. Thankfully that seems to be winding down and I look forward to the day that the country can be turned completely back to Iraqi control so that they can devolve once again into a dictatorship.

That seems to be their comfort zone, so give it to them.

Now I think that even back then I advocated that the Afghan War was “the good war” because it was the one where we were fighting and defeating the very people who attacked us.

But that’s not the case now, is it? The enemy, al-Qaeda, is in Pakistan. And the war in Afghanistan has shifted, just as it did in Iraq. In Iraq’s case the cause for war shifted from a search for WMDs that they surely had poised to harm us, to a decapitation of their foul, foul government. In Afghanistan it shifted from a search and destroy mission to eliminate al-Qaeda as a viable adversary to a decapitation of their foul, foul government, to defending the foul, foul government that we propped up in its place.

In short, the mission in Afghanistan is now not only wrong, but more wrong than the mission in Iraq was.

These are not worldly people in whose country we are fighting. All they see is an American presence in this decade replacing the Soviet presence in the decade of the 1980’s. We explain to them that we are only there to help them. Know what the Soviets were telling the Afghans 30 years ago? Exactly the same thing.

What the Mujahadeen did to defeat the Soviet army back then is legendary in Afghanistan. Who helped them to do it is a mystery to them.

Maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan is not in our national interest. It serves no useful purpose other than to prop up a lot of greedy corrupt government officials and their families as well as the family business: the opium trade.

It makes what we did in Vietnam to prop up that corrupt government, and their opium trade, pale in comparison.

I support the troops. I want them to come home as quickly as humanly possible without the loss of one more American life.

I deplore the fact that the Obama Administration has bought into the Pentagon’s plan for peace in the Middle East.

Obama had a plan. It involved engaging with our adversaries constructively. We voted for that plan. It’s time to execute that plan.