Nancy Pelosi, 2007

The exit strategy is easy – just go. The alternative is staying forever. With a trillion dollar deficit, I think we need to think about cutting costs.

Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us that never-ending occupations are very expensive and have no guarantee of success. Democracy promotion via military action simply isn’t cost effective.

A dirty little secret that WaPo won’t tell you: When they asked this same question last July, a majority of Democrats said the war wasn’t worth fighting then, too.

I know liberals who said that IN 2001.

And we AREN’T lying when we say the health care takeover bill will kill senior citizens to save money.

Does the President seem even remotely concerned about your well being?

No, actually, he seems pretty callous.

This is not a nice man.

But that is not human nature as we are creatures of the Law of Nature, and building civilization requires civility and the ability to back that to the hilt against those who would create only dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. In recognizing we are born with all liberty, positive and negative, we use reason to vest some few of our negative liberties in society and then into government so we can keep watch on them. That does not mean we lose even those negative liberties, however, but have common agreement to put their use to government for our self-protection. When we see those who reclaim all their liberties to fight as they will for themselves, we see man in his natural state and recognize them as Enemies of All Mankind.

Winning a war is not long term Victory: America learned that after WWI. We did not commit to Victory over those that supported our enemies but, instead, sought to buy them off while temporary Winning was had. And we, in turn, were had by that delusion that diplomacy could fix what was unfixable.

Afghanistan was always going to be hard: it is Mountain Warfare. The Left, by not understanding warfare, understanding human nature, thinks war can be done on a ‘dimmer switch’… but no form of warfare can be done that way, and Mountain Warfare requires logistics and more than just Theater Strategy for Winning not to speak of Victory. I cricized the strategy of Bush on this when it became crystal clear he had no intention of either carrying the fight outwards, had no ability to get agreement from Pakistan to go after the Taliban/al Qaeda and had zero plans for a good, hard, fast second supply route to Afghanistan. To Win, not to be Victorious, but just to Win so as to be able to create Victory one of those three if not two are mandatory. You either deploy irregulars or seek Letters of Marque and Reprisal for citizens to inflict harm on al Qaeda/Taliban and their supporters, or you get Pakistani National Support to fight inside Pakistan and get their help in the NWFP and other tribal areas, or you settle in for the long, hard fight and get a second supply route that requires your enemy to then shift their assets to try and go after that, and you are prepared to fight them along that entire route.

In Winning in Iraq we must be able to cement Victory and ensure that civil society there does not decay back into the maelstrom of outsider supported factional fighting. Yet we are not doing that. There, at least, we had secondary supply routes that, though feeble, existed. Plus there was a pre-existing civil society that was and is multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and accepted religious diversity as witness the Yezidi and followers of John the Baptist still living IN Iraq. Iraqis need to rebuild civil institutions and start the hard work of transforming their economy from natural resources to productive industry.

Afghanistan had no pre-existing civil infrastructure save for the remnants of the old inter-tribal fromal parliament system. There are no great water works to replace, no rail lines to put back into service, no large grain mills to upgrade and refit, no National electrical service… Yet we could change that by re-directing our support for Big Agriculture to Afghanistan, deploy our expertise in farming, water resource management, and necessary infrastructure there and put the billions wasted in pork into the fight.

Now the Left quails at the thought of all that pork put to good use and not towards simple, despicable political favoritism. Navel gazing once you have been hit, and hit hard, is an option only for the weak who will surrender to those willing to use their base natures to terrorize our civil discourse. We can deploy the Civil Sword, but to do so requires that we USE it and then recognize the hard work after Winning to complete Victory. Lose now and we condemn hundreds, if not thousands or more of our fellow citizens and people around the world to a worse life and frequent sudden death as those willing to be Natural Man use barbarity to get their way as our civilization fails.

Having no heart to fight, they surrender.

Having no mind to analyze warfare, they cannot speak with reason about it.

Having felt they understand human nature, they wish to ignore those things that point to how wrong they are about it.

That is a recipe for tyranny, not liberty.

Which is more worrying to the Democrats – making Obama look incompetent and a poor leader with large, vocal anti-war protests or the consequences of a larger, longer war in Afghanistan? I would guess the former, that is why there are no Democrat anti-war protests.

Bush, and now Obama, are simply sleepwalkers blundering among wide-awake jihadist killers.

We cannot win a war which we have utterly mis-defined.

profitsbeard on August 20, 2009 at 1:33 AM

Bush might have pulled back because of extreme political and media pressure but obama is just a cluster farg who’s changed the ROE twice already and is overtly trying to lose this and Iraq.

A better course than trying to “win” in Iraq or Afghanistan would be to bomb their jihadist troublemakers (whenever they raised an ugly head) from the air ~with drones, cruise missiles, Warthogs, or B-2′s, as needed, and to hell with placing any long-term troops among these brainwashed, dogmatically-violent schmucks.

Unless you go into a pernicious Muslim state to overthrow Islam, these halfway, half-hearted, half-witted “missions” are foredoomed to failure. And will only end up as interminable holding actions… that only allow the enemy to steal our advanced weaponry, learn our best military strategies, and then come back at us even stronger …because of our mental weakness in failing to confront the root cause of all of this “sectarian” lunacy and homicidal activity: Mohammad.

Either crush the tyranny that is fundamentalist Islam, or just hit them from the air and let the Muslims sort out their own moral and spiritutal corruptions (“holy” misogyny, sanctified pedophilia, a contempt for all other faiths, their eternally expanding imperialism, dogmatic cruelty, and a diseased “iconoclasm” which is anti-art, anti-music, anti-freedom of thought, ad nauseam) on their own.

Bush, and now Obama, are simply sleepwalkers blundering among wide-awake jihadist killers.

We cannot win a war which we have utterly mis-defined.

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday all dhimmis will join us
And the non-Islamic world will be as one

Daily we hear reports of violent acts committed by Islamic terrorists on every inhabited continent. We try to wish it away with the myth of the ‘Moderate Muslim’, telling ourselves the Islamic agenda has been’ hijacked’ by a ‘tiny minority of extremists’ and that soon the huge, silent, moderate majority of Muslims will take charge and change things. However, post 9/11 very few Muslims have condemned terrorist actions. We are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities. Waiting for this self-correction is our modern version of searching for unicorns.

Moderate Muslims will not be able to wrest control of the agenda for several reasons. First of all, Mohammad, the Messenger of Allah’s eternal word, was not moderate. No moderate can legitimately tell another Muslim to stop doing the extremist things Mohammad himself did. Also, the Qur’an condones violence and coercion to further the Islamic agenda. People whom we call moderates are labeled hypocrites by Allah Himself in the Qur’an. Moderates will always lose the argument because, as ex-Muslim author Ibn Warraq says, “There may be moderates in Islam but Islam itself is not moderate.”

Islamic expert Daniel Pipes and others estimate ten percent of the Islamic world to be militant. In 1933 when the Nazi party took control of Germany it had 2 million members, comprising only three percent of Germany’s sixty-six million citizens. A tiny minority of extremists can control a vast number of moderates, making them irrelevant.

Placing hope in ‘The Moderate Muslim’ is like searching for unicorns in the forest.
- JihadWatch (A_Plague_on_Both_Houses)

MB4 says his bigotry is justified because he hasn’t met any tolerant Muslims.

What a tool. I really hope your toxic attitude is stamped out of polite company in our party or we won’t see power again for a very long time?

Are you a Hal turner style plant trying to discredit conservatives?

frumian on August 19, 2009 at 11:32 PM

You are incoherent.

frumian on August 19, 2009 at 11:32 PM

Islam’s war on the West began in 600A.D….it has not abated. It had had periods of self-destruction, periods of quite plodding along, but it has never stopped in its war to turn the whole world into an Islamic paradise.

The current war on the West got its kick-start from the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini in 1936. From him, all the parts of radical Islam can be traced…the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ba’ath Party, and yes, even the taliban and al-Qaeda.

Over 1.6 billion Moslems out there…willing to follow any strong horse to achieve what the Koran commands.

yes, there are moderate Moslems, just as there are fallen Catholics or reform Jews, or sometimes baptists or other denominations. But, as soon as an advantage is seen, tasted, it is taken. This is the history of Islam since 600 A.D..

Even the Koran commands Moslems to mingle with the infidels if it may serve to prolong Islam in a given place or expand Islam eventually.

Are all Moslems the enemy? Perhaps not at times, but the doctrine of their faith is…unless you wish to submit.

I do not. I find their practices abhorant. I find their intolerance shameful.

I’d much rather deal with an intolerant Baptist any day than an intolerant Moslem.

What a tool. I really hope your toxic attitude is stamped out of polite company in our party or we won’t see power again for a very long time?

Are you a Hal turner style plant trying to discredit conservatives?

Exit question: Any lefties care to enlighten us in the comments as to what the withdrawal “strategy” here is? No one believes the country is secure against the Taliban; no one believes either that the Taliban would deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda. If the war on terror is now a war on Al Qaeda specifically, why cede an entire country back to them to use as their base of operations by pulling out?

It’s an incredibly challenging question. I don’t think we can just assume that, after the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan that Al-Qaeda has learned its lesson and, amazingly, Afghani citizens still are more afraid of the Taliban than they are desiring of a better life for themselves. I’m curious about the role of heroin production and the financing of the Taliban. Taliban weapons are bought with heroin money, the price of which is driven by its blackmarket status. Libertarians out there who have noticed the role marijuana plays in funding Mexican drug cartels should be sympathetic to similar arguments about heroin, legalizing it may severely cut into their weapons buying power.