I'm Right Again Dot Com

A new commentary every Wednesday   -  December 31, 2014


Upon learning that the war is over in Afghanistan: A Timeline, on the cusp of the new year.

   

 THE LAST HURRAH - I hear much less well as time goes on, so I didn't hear the bells and whistles.  I looked again for giant headlines, at least as high and black as those that appeared on all newspapers across our nation on September 2nd, 1945: JAPS SURRENDER, but they were nowhere to be found.

     April 19, 1951- Very few of us remember this: "OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE."  They, like Douglas MacArthur, get fired for insubordination over the conduct of the Korean "Police Action," and make a speech before Congress before they fade away. Look what was left behind to fester: North Korea and the Kim dynasty. 

      April 30, 1975 - Only when Saigon fell to the communist hordes from the north and we were discomfited by scenes of desperate people besieging our Saigon embassy and of aircraft flown by Vietnamese pilots crashing their fighter aircraft into the ocean alongside our fleeing naval vessels—then did the American people realize that the great excise in futility in Southeast Asia that began with a roar of military aircraft over Hanoi, had ended with a whimper—despite the almost unbelievable efforts of one the most valiant armies ever to be raised by this country. We lost a terrible, long, fruitless, bloody war, and from this remove there is little reason to keep on rehashing the reasons for that having happened, simply because that horribly painful experience apparently taught us absolutely nothing.

As illustration, on MARCH 19, 2003 - President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. We had already been in Afghanistan with special forces aiding the native mujahadin in ousting the Russians, and once upon a decade earlier, we had Hussein's Republican Guard cornered in eastern Iraq, after we had evicted his Army from Kuwait. By the time of shock and awe, we were on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But first, it had to be Saddam Hussein and his Weapons of Mass Destruction.

On to "Shock and Awe." It was really something wasn't it? Former Senator Donald Rumsfeld, the author of that descriptive phrase, pretty well explained the reason for it a couple of weeks later. "We know where the weapons of mass destruction are: They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."

    The man who told Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that this was so, was George Tenet, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Sadly for all Americans, neither of of them were the least bit competent. Despite his bombast, Don Rumsfeld never commanded as much as a Boy Scout Troop. He was former "Vice-President of Everything" Cheney's boy. These three brought about the departure from public life of one of this country's most brilliant military commanders, General Colin Powell, after Powell, as Foreign Minister, was persuaded to go before the UN Security Council with their trumped-up charges. The way Powell was left to twist in the wind was shameful. Rumsfeld felt that by bypassing acres of munitions and hundreds of thousands Iraqi soldiers in order to topple a statue in the center of Baghdad would bring a quick and inexpensive victory.

    MAY 1, 2003. i don't know who conceived the publicity stunt, but whomever did, needs to be ashamed for permitting Bush to appear in that ridiculous flight suit on an aircraft carrier declaring "Mission Accomplished." Yes, it was that long ago: Over  12 years, during which we lost the flower of our youth. We also spent ourselves into not virtual, but real bankruptcy from which we very possibly may never fully recover.

    Paul Wolfowitz. Remember him, chief suck-up to VP Chaney? To demonstrate how bright all three are, Bush made super-hawk Wolfowitz head of the World Bank, and he messed up by hiring his wife in a high-paying post. As part of the war-rousing cabal running the White House, Wolfowitz is famous for having admitted, "The truth is, for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason on which to go to war. That, and as George Double-U tearfully stated, "Saddam threatened to kill my daddy."

    When asked directly by Bush in a meeting with his top advisors, if he and his CIA were certain that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, CIA head Tenet replied, "It's a slam dunk." I keep asking myself, "How could anyone with the resources he had at his disposal for so long, could be so terribly, absolutely wrong? Why, why have we given a pass on this issue to everyone involved?

    We fought the longest war in U.S. History based on a myth!

    Little note was taken that month of a quote from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the effect that any doubts about the Iraqi Intelligence were not communicated to Bush. By then, inmates were in charge of the asylum.

    So now, the war is finally over in Afghanistan.  Well no, not exactly. We are leaving 11,000 personnel behind for "support and training purposes." (Insert appropriate expletive here).

    As for Iraq and Syria, there's a whole new war to be fought there by our surrogates, the Kurds, versus the most evil, insane, bloodthirsty horde the world has faced since Genghis Khan led his Mongols into the civilized world. If the Kurds win, you can bet the Kurds will want their own country.  If they succeed, they'll sure as hell deserve it. 

    Please wake me up when this nightmare is truly over. Sometimes I feel as if we, like Alice, had stepped through the looking glass into the psychedelic, Matrix-like Wonderland of 2015, where nothing makes sense anymore. 


-Phil Richardson, Observer and Storyteller

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