The only thing you need to read this morning is this BRILLIANT Frank Rich piece that rips “wrong-way” Mccain a new pie hole. The more and more you listen to this re-focus on Afghanistan the more it sounds like Iraq. These guys are so full of shit and the media are more than happy to let them. War sells newspapers.
The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks’ arguments don’t end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you’ll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must “win” in Afghanistan — but victory is left vaguely defined. That’s because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world’s dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.
Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama’s inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a “war of necessity.”
That little nugget above is one hell of a fact to leave out of the arguement. Sure, let’s go into war with a country that has no elected leader and a corrupt government. We should really be able to solve this problem easily.