On how many fronts can a government fail and still retain its legitimacy? The Bush administration is surely as bad as a Banana Republic … but with nukes, which makes it far more dangerous than a bunch of garden variety inept buffoons. Its reverse Midas touch has been evident again and again at home and abroad. While the foot soldiers of the GOP brigade are running like frightened rabbits from Bush and the Iraq war, the swagger of its leading men remains undiminished.
The news we hear is all about Iraq – the most glaring of the Bush administration’s lies and most disastrous of its follies. We know now what Bush-Cheney-Rummy have wreaked there. But what about Afghanistan? The other war? Against the real enemy – the Taliban and Al Qaida? The half hearted attempt on that front was the result of Bush’s obsession with Saddam Hussain who had nothing to do with the attack on the US on 9/11. It was very much akin to kicking the dog when you can’t talk back to your spouse or your boss. The real war on global terrorism (originating in Afghanistan and Pakistan) was cynically conflated with Iraq and Saddam Hussain and used to fool the US public (at least half of them – some of us never bought into it). Consequently, our fight against terrorism has been a sham and a failure. The unnecessary expenditure of Iraqi and American lives has been the high price we have paid to unseat an aging and mostly impotent dictator and to fulfill the oil soaked fantasies of global domination of cowardly neo-cons. Huge resources have been poured down the drain and the coffers of Halliburton and other friends of Bush-Cheney Inc.
While all eyes remain on the tragic fiasco in Iraq, Americans rarely take the time to reflect on the original reason to go to war – to catch, punish and neutralize the organizations which were responsible for the attack on September 11, 2001. We have not caught Osama and the Taliban monsters are up to their old ways. They now recruit young men in the border towns of Pakistan, some train in Iraq in more sophisticated warfare and the Talibs are now flexing muscles in southern Afghanistan. Poppies grow with abandon in the countryside and heroin trafficking is a booming Afghan business. Several suicide bombings and ambushes are reported to have taken place in recent months against the US and Afghan army. Education of Afghan girls faces renewed jeopardy. And President Hamid Karzai is effectively the mayor of downtown Kabul. How much longer before things go back to "normal" in this poor, brutalized and war torn nation?
Sorry about peppering a single post with so many colorful links. I wanted to update readers about Afghanistan so that we remember to dismiss the false claims made by the Bush administration whenever it utters the now hollow words, "fight against terrorism". The Bush regime is so mired in hypocrisy, atrocious lies and failures that it no longer qualifies as a target of political or literary satire; all it deserves is plain old ridicule.
Accidental Blogger 