Obama’s Delay Is Turning Afghanistan Into A Quagmire

Young Gun Conservative ^ | Gribbit

[YoungGunConservativeRadio]

Barack Obama we are told is a smart man. He attended Columbia University and Harvard Law. He lectured Constitutional law at the University of Chicago, but does any of this qualify him to be Commander-in-Chief?

On the campaign trail, candidate Obama famously called Afghanistan the “good war”. But the truth of the matter, Afghanistan was the stagnant war. The enemy shifted its focus to Iraq because that is where we chose to fight. The Taliban and al Qaeda where chased out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan and needed to be regrouped. So they called on Islamic “freedom fighters” to engage the mean old United States in its war against Islam in Iraq. Iraq for all the left’s bitching was the front line of the Global War on Terrorism...

[Huck]

We’re going on 7 years now, and it’s just becoming a quagmire?

[Frantzie]

He is bowing to his Saudi masters to humiliate the U.S. military for his Islamic overlords.

Judge David Carter are you listening? The military needs to demand proof and a BC. The next move is gays in the military.

These people are evil.

[TomasUSMC]

The next move is gays in the military

//////////////
You know with the current HEARTS AND MINDS campaign in Assistan, how will our generals explain to the religion of peace that we have infidel open homosexuality in our Army serving on their holy moslem turf?

Seems like it would go against obambi’s moslem teachings.

[piytar]

Yes. We’ve lost less than 900 troops in Afghanistan in those 7 (actually 8) years. While each loss is horrific, we’ve lost far more troops to on and off duty accidents and disease over that same time. However, if zero follows the Vietnam model, which he is doing by ignoring the military experts and making no decisions, we’ll lose FAR more than that over the next year. I’d say that qualifies as a quagmire...

[o-n-money]

Ted predicted this.

[TomasUSMC]

YOUR RIGHT

These new ROEs are killing OUR troops instead of the enemy. General McCucoo is kissing obambi’s butt ......

NO CLOSE AIR SUPPORT
NO ARTY
NO ATTACKING MOSQUES
NO ENTERING HOMES

[nathanbedford]

This article is crap.

It's Historical allusions to both Truman and Johnson are nonsense:

Examples – Harry Truman’s inability to win in Korea led to years of stalemate and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded because the President couldn’t pull the trigger.

Pull what trigger? Nuclear trigger? Invasion of China? The illusion is so wide of the mark that it undermines the author's entire position on Afghanistan. Far from being unable to pull the trigger, Truman had the courage, for whatever reason, to go to the defense of South Korea when he had not the resources properly to do so. He pulled the trigger all right with this decision in the teeth of much Congressional opposition especially from his own party.

LBJ’s micro-managing of Vietnam led to hundreds of thousands of names on a granite wall in Arlington, Virginia.

This assertion is so preposterous it requires no comment whatsoever.

The author might have considered whether engaging in door-to-door combat in Iraq or mountain fighting in Afghanistan, and exposing our boys to IED's in both places, are exactly the kind of conflicts in which a terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda would wish to engage us. The author might ask if trading body counts with 1.6 billion potential terrorists is a way for us to fight an asymmetrical war.

US forces are now needed in mass in Afghanistan or all will be lost.

All of what will be lost? What is a strategic objective? If we left Iraq prematurely as the author implies, does that mean that terrorists will filter back into Iraq because Americans left? What does that mean after we "win" in Afghanistan? Can we "win" in Afghanistan without winning in Pakistan? How in the hell do you propose to "win" in the mountain vastness of Waziristan?

It is well and good to bash Obama for his shortcomings as commander-in-chief and for his shameful elevating of politics over national security on this issue. But please, please let us not present ourselves to any independent who might be reading this thread as a bunch of mindless, reactive, troglodytes who accept crap for rational thinking and historical reality.

There is an argument to be made for a surge in Afghanistan but for God's sake let us not endorse crap.

[matthew fuller]

"LBJ’s micro-managing of Vietnam led to hundreds of thousands of names on a granite wall in Arlington, Virginia. "

Gribbitt was off by several thousand here, but otherwise, a very good and correct analysis of our idiot de facto president.

[Huck]

Is troop loss the way to measure a quagmire? I wasn't even thinking along those lines. We lost hundreds of thousands in WW2, and that was not a quagmire.

As I see it, a quagmire is when you get bogged down in a fight with no clear path to victory, no clear definition of victory, with tepid support politically, lacking the will to win, and lacking the will to leave. And so it muddles on, with no end in sight, costing lives and money we don't have, indefinitely. That to me is a quagmire.

[nathanbedford]

As I see it, a quagmire is when you get bogged down in a fight with no clear path to victory, no clear definition of victory, with tepid support politically, lacking the will to win, and lacking the will to leave. And so it muddles on, with no end in sight, costing lives and money we don't have, indefinitely. That to me is a quagmire.

That bears repeating, so I did.

The commander-in-chief does have a role. His role is to identify victory, that is to define it. He must adopt a strategy to attain victory, usually crafted by our professional military. He must articulate the vision of victory and the path to victory to the people so that they support the effort enough to sustain casualties and costs through to the end.

Obama has the enthusiasm to do this for healthcare. In that effort he has obviously been inept. He has obviously not the enthusiasm to do this for Afghanistan. And this is where he has failed his office and the people.

[Huck]

You’re right about Obama. Even where it’s something he cares about, he’s a failure as a leader. But when it comes to Afghanistan, it seems to me it’s been a quagmire in the making from the start.

[GloriaJane]

[nathanbedford]

I agree with that sentiment entirely and for the reasons expressed in this post some time ago:

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and we cannot kill all of them. The way to deal with any Islamic (Islamicist) movement is to enlist the sane Muzzies to liquidate the insane Muzzies because we have convinced the sane ones that if they do not police the crazies in their midst, we will kill them if the crazies do not. Even if we could kill them all, the mothers of America will never tolerate the kind of casualties required to do so unless you want to go nuclear in which case we in America will not be able to tolerate ourselves..

It’s time to get down to the business of thinking about America's strategic interests. What do we want to accomplish in Afghanistan? Obviously, we want to leave a country in place which does not support terrorism. That would be nice, but does it make us any safer? No. Because, so long as Waziristan provides a sanctuary for terrorism, it doesn't matter whether the terrorists also have Afghanistan. The problem compounds, if you want to leave Afghanistan a place which is not safe for terrorists you must also convert northwestern Pakistan into a place which is not safe for terrorists. If one of these places is not permanently "pacified" the other will equally not be pacified.

How do we propose to do that, with American boots on the ground? With 50% of America against the war in Afghanistan, what percentage of America do you judge will support putting troops into Pakistan? Assuming you can get public support for putting troops into Pakistan, can you be sure that the Pakistani government will not oppose our troops? Can you be sure that the Pakistani government will not threaten to use nuclear weapons against our troops? Even if such a threat were hollow when made, can we afford to disregard it? Can you see an end game to the pacification of Waziristan? I cannot. Neither could Winston Churchill more than a century ago.

Could it be done with drones and conventional air power working in close alliance with the Pakistani government and with some tribes in Waziristan? I do not know. As in every war America fights, we are in a foot race between our own casualty count and the enemy. Some might argue that the Serbs were pacified by air power alone, but is Afghanistan the same as Yugoslavia? Does not history teach us that "pacification" unavoidably means occupation? Have we figured out how to do that in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan without unacceptable casualty counts?

If casualty counts are not problematic enough, do we have the money? How broke are we? Is the debt growing to $11 trillion? Will the entitlements inexorably carry us to $26 million, as recently reported? It has now become a real question whether we can finance such a war.

While we are exercising our vision about how to pacify Waziristan, can we be sure that our efforts will not radicalize the reasonably sane portion of the Muslim population of Pakistan further against America? Will it turn the military against us? The Secret Police? What about those people who control the nukes? How much would take for people like A. Q. Khan who sold nuclear secrets to turn over some nukes to the Taliban or other terrorists in retaliation?

Would an American invasion with ground forces into the Northwest of Pakistan make that more or less likely? How do you know? But can we conduct our foreign policy out of fear or should we simply pursue our own best interests and let the chips fall where they may? According to Michael Scheuer, ex-of the CIA and responsible for watching bin Laden, we are not acting and have not been acting in pursuit of our own interests for years. He says that's why we are fighting these wars in the first place.

So we come back to my initial premise which is we must enlist the sane Muzzies to fight our war for us. We cannot win it alone. The way we enlist support from Muzzies is to show them who is boss. They respect power and they despise appeasement.

But let us not deceive ourselves. It required only 19 Muzzies to bring down the World Trade Center and kill 3000 Americans. We can kill all the Muzzies in Afghanistan, and they will still be able to scrape up from somewhere among the godforsaken corners of the world another 19 Muzzies to deliver what this time might be a weapon of mass destruction. And that weapon might just come from Pakistan. We cannot hope to conquer and hold every square inch of territory between the Atlantic coast of Africa and the western border of China in order to stop the formation of a terrorist squad only nineteen men (or women) strong.

So the war is primarily a war of intelligence. After we wring all the benefits we can out of our listening devices, we need indispensable local knowledge. Human intelligence must primarily come from the Muslim world because they have the language, the culture, and the tribal affiliation which we could never hope to penetrate. But we can hope to suborn them, turn one tribe against another, as the French did in North America and the British did so successfully in India and Pakistan. But conquering and holding territory is not the answer; it is probably not even the means to the answer.

A war of intelligence is primarily a war of alliances.

So when we do our strategic thinking about what the interests of America are in places like Afghanistan, we ought to consider what our goals are there and how we can accomplish them. Putting boots on the turf and holding it as an end in itself is worse than useless, I fear it is self-defeating.

Putting boots on the ground and fighting only to a stalemate is the equivalent of defeat because it unnerves our allies, encourages our enemies, and dispirits our grieving mothers. Rather than intimidating Muslim governments to cooperate with us, it encourages them to pander to their street. Intelligence suffers. When intelligence suffers it actually makes us more vulnerable, not less.

Whatever we do, must be done decisively and successfully or not at all.

Until we're able to answer fundamental questions and articulate exactly what troops there in Afghanistan can accomplish and at what cost, we are just spending blood and treasure without purpose.

[PhilDragoo]

Yes, he has appeared on many shows, done any number of primetime speeches for his healthcare project.

He's rebuffed his general and instituted crippling rules of engagement.

Although he thinks he's keeping a low profile in that theater, he's telling the opposition fighters to keep fighting.

Osama in his 1998 ABC interview explained his fighters were heartened by the rapid retreat from Mogadishu.

There may be something of a parallel with the comfort which Colonel Bui Tin took from the growing opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Obama has removed the phrase War on Terror from the lexicon.

Napolitano speaks of man-caused disaster.

Does Obama see any need to be in Afghanistan.

In March he expressed interest in negotiating with the Taliban.

His major foreign policy figures Brzezinski and Gates coauthored the 2004 CFR paper Iran: Time for a New Approach calling for negotiations.

He has received the Nobel Prize for Peace because he defined himself as a Citizen of the World.

I posit his desire is to finesse the matter with nonmilitary means, as he is antimilitary in his thinking.

In my view he is also antiAmerican, denigrating American interest at every opportunity.

He has also expressed a distaste for the concept of victory.

What in his psyche can make the deck of the Missouri sixty-four years ago so awful.

At present it appears there is greater likelihood that homosexuals in the military will be allowed to self-identify than the tens of thousands of additional forces will be provided.

Obama does not surprise.

He has told us in fifty-two seconds what he will do.

It has much to do with renouncing leadership, cancelling weapons programs, pursuing diplomacy with America's avowed enemies.

It has nothing to do with victory for any given American endeavor.

In the ever more uncertain world, we may rely upon Obama's steadfast pursuit of American decline.

[mkjessup]

Excellent points you've made.

The fact is, Truman chose to allow U.S. forces to defend South Korea under the flag of the United Nations for the first time, and we can see the results of that train wreck.

Truman knew something that MacArthur did not, when the General was pushing for expanding the war, and that was the fact that the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal at that time consisted of 13 and only 13 atomic bombs of the Nagasaki 'Fat Man' design. If America had used those weapons on the ChiComs and/or North Korea, it would have given a green light to the Soviets to over run the rest of Europe.

Mac wasn't able to get behind the policy of the President, and that is why he was fired. A great General? Absolutely, but he painted his President into a corner and left Truman with only two choices; fire MacArthur or leave the Presidency permanently weakened for not exercising the Commander-in-Chief's authority when necessary.

As for Johnson? All he had to do was listen to General Curtis E. LeMay, who said in May 1964 "Tell the Vietnamese they've got to draw in their horns or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age."

LeMay knew how to win a war, it was that goddamned Robert McNamara who knew only how to LOSE one.

[nathanbedford]

I am sporadically dipping into a biography of Mao which argues persuasively that Mao precipitated, or at least lobbied Moscow to authorize, the invasion of South Korea precisely in order to create a quagmire which would drain American lives and resources. The trade-off for North Korea or China in lives was a matter of moral and political insignificance to the communists involved.

Without judging the firing of MacArthur one way or the other, it is accurate to say that the war settled into a war of attrition after his departure in which we were fortunate to find Ridgway who managed to stabilize the situation and bring the war to a stalemate along the geographical lines on which it had begun. In that sense, Truman's war aim-to deny an invader the fruits of its crime- succeeded. But so did Mao's.

The real and true failure of Truman was to permit the United States military atrophy to the point where it could not even field a couple of divisions and some United States Marines in Korea in a reasonable time.

There is strong evidence that Lyndon Johnson committed the nation to the war in Vietnam under a twin set of false premises: first, there is evidence that he knew that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a fraud; further, he was motivated to engage in a war that he thought might be a quagmire of the political fear of being labeled the president who lost Southeast Asia in the wake of the Democrat president who lost China.

In any event, the largest failure of the Vietnam War was the failure to coordinate aims with strategy and strategy with tactics. Because the initial strategy, to defend South Vietnam by means which would not offend Russia, China, the United Nations, or liberals at home and abroad, the war aims were probably unwinnable. Tactics, such as full throttle bombing of the North, were always made hostage to a false strategy. One cannot wage war conditioned upon the subjective reaction of your enemy's allies because the enemy's allies will simply modify their reaction to defeat your tactics. It is akin to defining hate speech by the reaction of the NAACP.

It is this failure to define victory and contrive strategy and tactics to accomplish it, that make the danger of quagmire in Afghanistan with this president as commander-in-chief real in the extreme.

[myknowledge]

Close air support with A-10s, and along with O-1 Bird Dogs as AFACs (to prevent civvy casualties).

[justa-hairyape]

We’ve lost less than 900 troops in Afghanistan in those 7 (actually 8) years

According to Wikipedia the Soviets lost 14,453 in about 9 years. So with poor management, Afghanistan can potentially become extremely problematic.

[mkjessup]

If you should ever offer an online class in geopolitical history, it is my intention to sign up. I learn something new every time I read one of your posts.

Thank you for that!

Best,

MKJ

[Huck]

Excellent, albeit depressing, summation of the situation. I'd add that when our gubmint pretends that these foreign wars somehow "keep us safe", they lull the American people into a false sense of security. It's much worse than people think, because, as you say, no matter how many of them we kill, they can find 20 willing terrorists and attack us at a time of their choosing. We're truly in a very dangerous situation.

I happen to think these wars were what our enemies wanted. We've spent ourselves into near-oblivion, with marginal results at best. I honestly don't feel any safer without Saddam than I did with Saddam. I think the Iraq War was a joke.

The war in Afghanistan is accomplishing nothing. In the end,it will be a stalemate at best, as you say. In a sense, the Bush people had it right, that the culture of the Middle East has to change or else we're screwed. But thinking we could bomb and kill them into good neighbors seems a little,uh, stupid.

I don't know. I sometimes wonder if we aren't all just suckers. If there really is some dark conspiracy, and things happen for reasons totally different from what we're told.

What are your thoughts regarding Ron Paul's commentary on our foreign policy. I know that "isolationism" is a dirty word. And it may be too late for the US to try it anyway. Just wondering your thoughts. I personally think we shouldn't try to "lead the world." We should just do business, protect ourselves, and keep out of other people's messes--including Israel's--unless it truly is our neck in the sling.

[piytar]

You make a very good point, sir.

I would view a maassive increase in troop casualties in the same theater due to poor leadership as a definite symptom of that theater becoming a quagmire, though, and I’m afraid that’s what we are going to see.

[piytar]

Just one comment: Please run for office. Please. You have FAR clearer vision on this than just about any expert I’ve read, let alone any politician.

[nathanbedford]

Much of this that follows is repetitive of your comments and the of my reply as well, yet I want to set it forth so that we can see that we are on the same wavelength. Perhaps another reply to think about Ron Paul is in order:

In discussing this topic, how do we identify and pursue the national interest of the United States, we stipulate that we have a president in power who wants to advance our national interests. It is astonishing and terribly revealing that we have to stipulate this about our president merely to have a coherent discussion of American foreign policy. I am well aware that there is a body of evidence which indicates the contrary of the stipulation. Let us assume that we have a president who will consciously choose the options which he believes will advance America so we can at least get on with an analysis.

When a chief executive and commander in chief weighs new strategic options he must consider whether a particular option will cost more than it gains. This is the analysis which I am asking us to undertake concerning Afghanistan. Even our military officers whom you want to turn loose are divided in this judgment.

When we "oppose evil and thump those who attack America" a Commander-in-Chief must ask himself do I have the resources, including the support of the American people, sufficient to see this option through or am I pursuing a feel-good policy which ultimately weakens America in a generational asymmetrical world war? If I choose this course, will America be stronger 20 years from now to contend with an enemy who can move from Afghanistan to Waziristan to Cairo or even to Detroit at the speed of commercial air transportation? A president must ask himself, do we have the wherewithal in the midst of a financial and economic crisis, the dimensions of which we still do not know, to wage wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan at the cost literally of millions of dollars a day? If we indulge our emotions to wage war in Afghanistan, whose war are we fighting, ours or the enemies? Who will ultimately win a war of casualty count?

Can I honestly tell my people, as president, that if they pour their blood and treasure into Afghanistan they will be safer against a stealth strike in the homeland? Can I honestly tell them that we will be stronger after we spend our treasure and our blood? Can I say to them, "my fellow Americans, we are not just shoveling flies in Afghanistan, we are making the homeland safer?" Can I say, "this is the best use of our precious resources?"

What are our strategic interests? Certainly high on the list comes the issue of nuclear proliferation to Islamicists. Clearly the Taliban in Afghanistan is not a threat in this regard. Are the Islamicists in Pakistan a very real threat to acquire nuclear weapons? Obviously the answer is yes. Can I honestly represent to the American people that to pursue an asymmetrical war against the ragtag Taliban in Afghanistan makes it less likely that the Taliban will acquire nuclear weapons in Pakistan?

It is certainly in our strategic interest to enlist Muslim countries in support of a war against the Islamicists. Concededly, if we are just flat whipped in Afghanistan the whole Muslim world, especially the Arab world, will feel emboldened to confront America openly and through terrorism. But what if we only fight to a stalemate in Afghanistan? Will we have gained the support of the Muslim world? How many lives is the propaganda value of a victory in Afghanistan worth? How much treasure?

I think the Mr. Obama should ask himself, why is the war in Afghanistan different from the war in Iraq? Does the whole thing turn in the accident of a choice by bin Laden to locate a few dusty tents and ramshackle buildings in Afghanistan? Of what significance is that?

I think the president should also ask himself, why, by all accounts from our senior military observers, are we losing the war to a bunch of rag tag illiterates after seven years? Our initial invasion was done with the help of some Afghan tribes, why have we been so unsuccessful in building upon that model? Why are the tribes against us and against the national government and why did the national government have to resort to voter fraud in order to retain its majority? Do these questions indicate that our fundamental strategy in Afghanistan is utterly flawed?

Do these questions indicate that there is no realistic possibility of substituting Afghan boots on the ground for American boots on the ground even if we supply logistics and air power for the Afghan boots? It has, after all, been seven years.

I as a president who actually wants America to prevail, must know that our resources are stretched and our reserves are virtually exhausted. A miscalculation here could cause the decline and fall of the American century. Is the game in Afghanistan worth that?

[Huck]

Even our military officers whom you want to turn loose are divided in this judgment.

I'm not saying turn em loose. I'm questioning the whole enterprise.

Let's say our hypothetical American president decides that Afghanistan was a mistake, or is unwinnable. The next question is: which is worse, stalemate or withdrawal?

At this point, I think withdrawal is better. But the politicians will ensure that it can't be done in a way which is least damaging to America. The GOP aspirants will make hay of it, and already have, saying it's retreat, emboldens our enemies, etc.

All of that may be true, but all the same, they say when you're digging a hole...

It seems many on both sides put politics ahead of country. The question is what is best for America right now. I think your question "Is Afghanistan worth it" answers itself. No. It's not. Never was. It was a fool's errand from the start.

Here's another question--why did they attack us on 9-11? What did they want us to do in response? Some argue they were drawing us into war, where they wanted it to occur. Was it just bloodlust, or was it strategic? And if so, did we fall into the trap? And if so, how do we get out of it?

[Huck]

We'll only see massive troop casualties if we see a doubling-down on troop presence, which is what the right is clamoring for. The status quo, unacceptable as it is, hasn't brought a lot of casualties. The truth is most Americans don't give Afghanistan much thought. It was a sideshow to Iraq for all these years. Why do we still have over 100,000 troops in Iraq? When do they get to come home? The whole thing seems very ill-conceived.

I often say that the criticism that comes from the opposition is usually correct to some degree. John Kerry was a haughty French looking surrender monkey. But likewise, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were arrogant chicken hawks.

[nathanbedford]

In response to your inquiry about my take on Ron Paul:

I am generally wary of ideological approaches to all problems. In other words, Ron Paul could be right 80% of the time but then in the 1900s along, two fellows named Hitler and Stalin come along and we are confronted with the kind of evil that Ron Paul's libertarianism simply cannot cope with ideologically and morally.

On the other hand, if one looks at the sum of the major wars since 1945, one has to question what we have achieved on a cost-benefit basis. Between Korea and Vietnam we lost what about 80,000 fatalities? We preserved South Korea against conventional invasion but failed to preserve Vietnam against guerrilla invasion. We won two wars in Iraq but what have we permanently gained? In the first war we preserved Kuwait from a conventional invasion, much like Korea. In the second war we have fashioned a representative government of sorts but it is an open question how long it will prevail as such, how long it will be aligned with the West, how long it will refrain from being a haven for terrorists.

It seems to me there two ways one can look at these four wars. We can regard Korea and Vietnam as battles in the Cold War. Thus they should be seen as part of a larger struggle the defining characteristic of which was the potential for mutual nuclear destruction. That dominant reality renders struggles that would have been largely unsatisfactory in a conventional world, a necessary part of a struggle in the new paradigm.

Similarly, we can view Iraq and Afghanistan as battles in a worldwide, multigenerational war against Islamist terrorism bent on conquering the world thus threatening us not unlike the threat posed by Soviet communists. Seen in this context, the wars might make more sense.

So we should have asked ourselves, did our struggles in Korea and Vietnam further or inhibit our war against communism? So we should ask ourselves, are these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan making us more or less safe, are they winning the war against terrorism?

Clearly, this is a departure from Ron Paul because it assumes that America must make proactive decisions concerning its national interest and decisively act in accordance with its understanding. This is based on an assumption that the Islamist like the communist represent an evil influence which must be pro actively defeated. That means we do not live in an age after 1815 in which the United States could bask in benign isolation.

So I think Ron Paul comes close to the mark in this respect because he would apply a cost-benefit analysis to our foreign engagements. Eisenhower, ironically, was a man with the stature and the military biography who could and did insist upon such an accounting. Hence his emphasis on nuclear deterrence as a way of blocking Moscow on the cheap. Hence his farewell warning of a military-industrial complex. All Republican Presidents since Eisenhower have been determined not to be caught on the wrong side of preparedness. Kennedy, the rare Democrat in this respect, exploited an alleged missile gap in the space race for political gain. I think Bush utterly failed to run a cost-benefit analysis on the Iraq war but I do believe his father considered the costs in starting and ending his war against Iraq. Democrats have a dreadful record on maintaining preparedness which is so often deprived us of options and cost us lives.

The days of lavishing money on intelligence and on military preparedness are numbered. Clearly, our days of fighting brush fire wars around the globe are numbered.

I think we are running out of options. I think America is running out of money. I think we will be running out of morale and national self-confidence. At a time when we desperately need a national leader who, like Eisenhower, will keep our powder dry and intervene only when it really matters, we have Barack Obama.

I believe that Obama will run a cost-benefit analysis on the Afghan war. But his question will not be so much whether the war makes the nation safer, but whether he will have enough money left over to advance Marxism domestically.

My main worry about Barack Obama is not the conventional fear often expressed on these threads. I do not think he operates in the international scene as a Jimmy Carter on steroids, that is, a naif who simply cannot recognize a national security threat. I fear that what we have in Obama is a dangerous mixture of narcissism and ideology. When his personal power is threatened I think he will not for a moment shrink from using force. But you will note, that if he uses force, and it is in furtherance of our national interest, that will be a coincidence. His narcissism is something that would make Eisenhower puke and something that has the potential for an American calamity.

I cannot say anything but misery for America if Obama's energy policy is not reversed. His narcissism and ideology are driving us to disaster as our ideological enemies are rapidly being granted a near monopoly on energy by Obama. It is not by accident that Russia and Venezuela and Iran are courting each other. It is frightening that Obama is toothless in the face of this potential threat.

I bring this up for its own sake and because it illustrates that the ideology of Ron Paul, in my judgment, is ineffective on this issue. I believe he would say that the market will control the producers of energy. I am not sure that the constraints of the market will apply to the fundamentalists in Iran if they get the bomb. I am not sure that a Hugo Chavez will not behave as did Fidel Castro during the Cuban missile crisis when he urged a nuclear exchange with the United States if we were invaded. Such is the danger of ideology. It is not clear that Ron Paul's paradigm will control these ideologues.

[nathanbedford]

Huck:

I am sorry I did not make it clear that portion of my reply #24 that is not in italics is a reply a week or so old. I should have made that clear.

I agree with the bulk of your post #27.

Whether by design or not, we must be very wary of getting sucked into combat which amounts to a war of casualty Count which we cannot win because the mothers of America will not stand for it.

This is why the idea that we should wage war in Iraq because it sucks terrorists into the cauldron where we can kill them, struck me as about as dumb as pounding the tar baby. That is why I started off my original post saying there are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world and we cannot kill all of them no matter how many we sucked into Iraq.

[Huck]

I appreciate your thoughts on the matter. Hope to “see” you around here again sometime.

[Huck]

Energy policy is another topic worth discussing. It seems to me nuclear power would have to be a big part of energy independence. Then again, I wonder if the terror threat doesn’t make that even less politically teneble than it was before 9-11. I wonder if that wasn’t part of the plan. Cripple our economy and diminish our will and confidence by attacking and murdering Americans, draw us into stupid wars, and cripple our ability to gain energy independence. We are in deep, deep doo-doo.

[nathanbedford]

Reading your post for the first time, I took you to be describing the activities of Barack Obama (LOL) in effectively shutting down new nuclear power generation by torpedoing the Yucca Mountain storage.

Anyone who is not serious about nuclear energy is not serious about global warming. I can only assume that Obama and the rest of them are exploiting global warming to advance socialism. This is what I meant by their ideology being so very dangerous. We are exposed us not just financially but militarily and geopolitically on this issue and Obama is walking us right into the jaws of a trap.

He is not finished on Cap and Trade, he has threatened to bankrupt the coal producing and coal energy producing industries, he has straggled domestic drilling for oil, and his quixotic solution is to (forgive the pun) tilt at windmills. He will finish bankrupting the dollar and caused us untold jobs while leaving us at the mercy of oil-producing nations.

Small wonder I confused Obama with the terrorists.

[TomasUSMC]

rIGHT NOW I’d rather have Bin Ladin walking around Kabul, instead of dead, than obambi walking around the White House killin US.