Y'know Raymond... Everytime I find myself reading commentaries like your own, which attempt to deliberately blur the rationale for the actions we're currently engaged in, I only have to ponder the thousands who died in the WTC attac, and the families they left behind, for reality to come sharply back into focus.
This was NOT a foreign policy failure that led to that attack Raymond. It was an intelligence failure. It was a failure induced by the belief in a "peace dividend" that directly led to MAJOR reductions in both the intelligence and military budgets (40% in the case of the military)...
The WTC attack was in planning for 3 years, yet we failed to detect it because our intelligence service saw no reason to focus on Afghanistan.. We permitted our immigration laws to become a farce where hundreds of thousands of foreigners are loose in our nation with expired visas...
We're so open of a society that those would seek to harm us have very little difficulty in using that openess to their own advantage..
So if you want to talk about a conspiracy, discuss why the US permits felons to become citizens... Discuss why we have no effective system for identifying violators of our immigration law. And discuss why we currently have a million case backlog of security clearance investigations that need to be completed.
And a "tame" Afghanistan would be good for the entire region of Central Asia, not just a couple of oil companies...
If you want to discuss conspiracies, ask why the Pashtun culture would develop a belief that even murderers and criminals must be harbored and protected??
As far as I'm concerned the US had the right to confront the Taliban several years ago when it was apparent that their "guest", Bin Laden, was responsible for the bombing of the US embassies in Africa. We just had to lose thousands of people first before we woke up to the fact that these guys are serious about killing Americans in large quantities.
And with regard to "inflating threats"... we can't even get a pathetic nation like Afghanistan to immediately cave into our will... Lord knows how we would have fared against the massed artillery fires of a Soviet army in Europe. Having participated in several war games associated with Europe, I can tell you that it was expected that every US line unit in Europe was expected to be rendered non-effective within several weeks, and that it would only be reinforcement from the US that would turn the tide of battle, if at all.
What you fail to acknowledge is that 2/3 of the US defense budget goes to paying salaries, a far greater percentage that spent by other armies. We pay a basic private some $600/month, where as his Russian counterpart is looking to receive $30/month.
Thus, the result is that the DOD is a huge "jobs program", with very little left over for actually developing and fielding new weapons systems. We have to purchase them in relatively small quantities over a period of years, which jacks up the cost per unit, and makes us dependent upon foreign sales to off-set developmental costs.
And you know something... I don't like being the world's "cop" anymore than you do. Just like I don't like being the world's welfare system... But we find whenever we pull back from asserting ourselves into world affairs, we're inevitably dragged in anyway to clean things up, just as we were in the Balkans (and it's still a mess).
And one last point about "recruiting"... It doesn't seem to have come across the minds of these extremists that they were "recruiting" a sense of American resolve and unity... We're accidentally killing civilians because the Taliban are hiding in their midst...
But they DELIBERATELY TARGETED our civilians...
In my perspective, that makes all the difference.
Hawk |
