Vietnamistan - The New Big Lie | Cape Cod Daily News

By TRB

- "First you fight the war for your country,then you fight your country for the war. - M. Lindsey

This is just so pathetic - this almost decade-long military operation in Afghanistan. The President should get us out of there immediately. It was, after all, Obama himself, who increased troop strength just when every other brain-laden person was telling him to get out. Now we have 90,000 troops over there with no mission whatsoever.

What they do is get shot or blown up and they die. Sometimes they accidentally kill civilians. All of this in the name of nothing. I hate in the name of nothing when it comes to war. It borders on the criminal, even crosses the line. To kill people or to watch people die day-after-day for no reason must be a crime. If it is not a crime, we must make it one.

General David Petraeus, commander of this mess, has spent the past two days trying to explain the war to the U.S. Congress, and he can't even do it. He said his son is a young officer over there, as if that would give him some objectivity, when the soldier in me knows it only gives the general's son quicker promotions.

We first went into Afghanistan almost 10 years ago looking for Osama bin Laden. For many years since, we have known he is not here, but like people who just enjoy invasive wars, we've come up with a set of goofy excuses to stay there, and increase troop size to figures that boggle the mind. Many ex-military out here are rolling in our graves. And we're not even dead yet.

So let's have some doses of reality: General Petraeus and Barack Obama have got themselves in a terrible fix called "How to get out of a war we shouldn't be in in the first place and still save face." This is a tough game. We tried this in Vietnam, but the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army were taking over the city of Saigon, literally as U.S. troops were leaving.

The "mission" that no one will state in Afghanistan. No one will state it because it is extremely insane and even funny if you're lucky enough to have use of both of your legs. The U.S. military wanted us to believe that they were going to turn the Taliban-infested, tribal-run, utterly massive nation of Afghanistan into a democracy.

It gets better. They were going to do this with a man named Hamid Karzai, whose roots can be traced back just a generation or so to one of Afghanistan's most prominent Taliban families. So the U.S. installed him as president in Kabul, a city he rarely leaves, partly because the rest of the nation doesn't know who he is and also he has stated he doesn't like to get his hands dirty.

We can't finish with this Karzai guy yet though, because he represents us in Afghanistan. I am sure you know Karzai. He is the fellow who wears the pill box, Hepburnish fur hats and the thick, maybe Terri-cloth or velour bathrobes. His sleeves are very wide. I almost expect to see little dogs hidden in them, as a French King was once known to do.

He often takes fits in the presence of our Ambassador, which makes sense in a way, because it is generally understood among most thinking people that Hamid Karzai is mentally ill. His threats are aways interesting. Recently he threatened to "join the Taliban." His mere presence has been said to "deeply alienate" those involved in U.S./NATO "efforts," whatever those are.

Another thing about our guy Karzai, he regularly receives what he calls "bags of cash" from the leaders in Iran. He receives from Iran between $700,000 and $950,000 twice a year for what he calls his "official presidential expenses."

Some of these expenses are for drugs, even heroin according to one ex-diplomat. The CIA apparently has a paper on him proving that he was diagnosed as a manic depressive. But he doesn't take his medication, which would be Lithium or Depakote. Karzai takes black tar heroin for manic depression. Some say it doesn't work as well.

Iran likes the guy because they understand the longer he stays in office, the longer the U.S. will be there and they like this arrangement in Afghanistan and in Iraq where we still have 40,000 or so soldiers. Iran likes this because our presence draws attention to Iran allowing them to portray us as the warmongers we seem so intent on proving ourselves to be.

For Obama this all comes down to politics. If the right starts to complain about Afghanistan, he'll bring the troops home because he doesn't want anything to threaten his chances in 2012. If they don't complain, he's talking three more years. Yes, it is purely a political decision for him; that is how far away his thinking is from anything independent, or progressive. Remember, those are the two voting groups who are going to put him out of the White House in 2012. You read it here first.

Not too long ago the U.S. Army had a crazy soldier, all filled with medications because his shrinks thought he might be a danger to himself or others. So the U.S. Army thought it might be a good idea to give this soldier a gun and send him off to guard the cell of the highest ranking Taliban leader in captivity in Afghanistan.

Naturally the Taliban leader was found with several bullet holes in his head. Well Karzai wasn't having a good day at the palace. Who knows, maybe he was trying to kick. But he knew this Taliban leader personally and he was one angry mentally deranged U.S. puppet. He demanded that the other mentally deranged person in the room (the U.S. soldier), the alleged killer, who kept revisiting the night his buddy's brains were blown in his face, be put under arrest and into shackles immediately. The U.S. military, complied.

The so-called "mission" in Afghanistan requires even more lies than were told about the mission in Vietnam. And there's this almost psychedelic quality to it, this just barely controlled insanity. And then it still just sits there looking like a plain old bald face lie.