From Stark
A recent poll shows that 55 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now believe that the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting, according to an ABC News Poll.
The Post’s story indicates that Obama’s plan to hand over the fighting to Afghan forces by the end of 2014 should be a plus for Obama in his all-but-certain fall campaign against Mitt Romney.
Overall, two-thirds of Americans now believe that the war was a bad idea, according to the poll.
But I suspect that economics, not foreign and military policy, will be the key factor in the outcome of the election.
One question will be the big question John:
Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?
If you own GE and pay no taxes the answer is a big yes!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
This anti-war consensus comes …Not in the nick of time for the GOP to have embraced Ron Paul, the real conservative who would conserve the lives of our soldiers and conserve trillions in military spending, and would make a smaller government get out of our libraries and internet and personal passtimes.
He’s too old now, you missed your chance, GOP.
Somewhat less military Obama may beat conventionally pro-military Romney.
If this is how the war is being run it is way past time we have gotten out!
“And so while Chazray was dying, his Dustoff medevac was sitting idly on the runway down at Kandahar Airfield….
Specialist Chazray Clark was dying due to politics, and the Army and Air Force pilots are very angry about this. Chazray’s is not the only such case. Army medevac helicopters fall under the Medical Services Corps, who mark medevacs with red crosses. Officers will tell you face-to-face that the Medical Corps does not want to give up its helicopters because senior officers want their own helicopters to shuttle them from here to there…
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/red-air-americas-medevac-failure.htm
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Imagine a vulture capitalist without a soul or convictions running the military as Commander in Chief.
Romney has already shown he’ll sacrifice people for money so our servicemen and women won’t be in for any different treatment.
“Shintoism, insofar as it is a religion of individual Japanese, is not to be interfered with. Shintoism, however, insofar as it is directed by the Japanese Government, and is a measure enforced from above by the government, is to be done away with. People would not be taxed to support National Shinto and there will be no place for Shintoism in the schools. Shintoism as a state religion — National Shinto, that is — will go…Our policy on this goes beyond Shinto…The dissemination of Japanese militaristic and ultra-nationalistic ideology in any form will be completely suppressed. And the Japanese Government will be required to cease financial and other support of Shinto establishments.” — telegram of James Bymes, U.S. Secretary of State to the supreme commander of Allied Powers in Japan, 1945.
Democracy is not Shinto, nor Sharia, law. By that definition, neither of our recent wars have been “won” with the sacrifices made by Western troops.
When the West defeated Shinto Japan, another militaristic religion-government, a major requirement was to guarantee that no further dictatorial relationship between government and religion ever reoccurred in that nation. Japan has since prospered under that constitutionally mandated obligation.
To separate that church-as-state government from Shinto required unconditional surrender, a condition that required unconditional warfare to achieve. Tokyo was firebombed into an Eastern version of Dresden. Hiroshima. There were no apologies needed, then, for those wartime brutalities. Ask the Chinese who suffered terribly during Japanese occupation. Ask London during the Blitz. Ask the Russians, the Poles, The Filipinos.
The idea of religion as government is anathema to Western democracy. Nations, whose stated purpose is to destroy our way of life and replace it with their own, cannot retain tribal, 7th century, customs as governmental edicts. Shinto Japan is not so different from militant Islamic nations demanding of their citizens a life under strict Sharia law. Japanese “suicide bombers”, the Kamikaze, similarly sacrificed their lives to kill us under indoctrinated religious fervor. They too were “state sponsored”. They were “believers”. They were deadly. Japanese troops were ferocious. In many battles, they fought until the last man. It took total war to defeat them.
Afghanistan is such a ‘nation’ (sometimes more tribal than national), so are some nations that share its borders. The West has been targeted for elimination by these nations and tribes. They have demonstrated this hostility with both words and actions. Yet the West waits. It restrains its mighty fist. We leave their governments, their peoples, and ourselves subservient to the the edicts of Sharia.
Afghanistan represents a war that must be won. It has been the linchpin from the beginning. Like Japan, real freedom for the Afghans will ultimately help their country. It was, and is, a war worth fighting.
Hindsight is 20/20 but IMHO what we should have down with the Afghans is do as we did, level the Taliban but then get out and every time (the Taliban) they raised their ugly heads again with evil in their eyes hit them with something that makes them know they better stay in their holes or there be a lot of hurt coming their way.
The military is government and as with all government you can get turf wars etc that sometimes makes the mission secondary, IMHO nation building by propping up tin horn dictators don’t work any better in Afghanistan than it did in southeast Asia.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Obama lied last time. I suspect he will lie again. The only way we will get out of Afghanistan and Iraq (still 15,000 or so troops there – remember Vietnamization in 1973?) is when we are forced out by the insurgents.
That’s funny that anyone in America would think of The Taliban as some kind of Head to be Reared.
It’s a philosophy whose adherents look exactly like the Afghans we’re training,
the villagers we’re wooing and the Pakistanis we’re bribing.
But we can agree that installing leaders by force for others has never worked
even when the Supremes did it to Americans.
“Anyone who has a heart and a soul would find it challenging to not have tears well up in their eyes upon seeing the anguish on this young girl’s blood-spattered face; a young girl who was targeted not once, but twice by evil. But Taliban militants have no hearts or souls,….
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=taliban+evil&view=detail&id=E05F9D5EE998064273B5445D3C0705AC29EE2852&first=0&qpvt=taliban+evil&FORM=IDFRIR
Evil has a head my friend!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
The Taliban kills those Afghans that would resist the rule of the Taliban.
America kills those Afghans that would resist the rule of America.
There’s no such thing as evil in Afghanistan because it looks exactly like good.
rubie- It scares me to death when I find myself agreeing with you.
We should never have gone back into Afghanistan in the first place. That was one thing that Bush was right about. We had done everything that we could in Afghanistan. That was originally the idea about Iraq. They didn’t want Iraq to become the new headquarters of the worldwide radical Islamists.
Unfortunately, Afghanistan became a political tool in the 2008 election. Obama described Afghanistan as the “right war”, and he couldn’t back down after he took office, so he changed the rules of engagement.
So, now we are not only fighting the wrong war, (a useless war), we are fighting it the wrong way (with self-defeating rules of engagement).
Bring our troops home, Bring them home NOW.
Rubie – A couple of weeks ago you made some remarks about the grain being, or rather not being, shipped from Cherry Point. Could you point me in the direction where I can read some of that information that you were posting about not being enough room on the land at Cherry Point and any other reasoning behind the belief that there will be no grain shipped from the terminal.
I’m wondering if you know how many other grain terminals there are in the state of WA? Evidently, the SSA people are claiming that there are no other grain terminals in WA and that the only grain terminal is in Portland. I pointed out that there was the new grain terminal in Longview, but I’m pretty sure that there are others as well. Do you know where they are or where to look for that information?
The math behind how much space it takes for silo storage to fill a grain bulker is pretty easy since the goods must be on-site to make the process work.
I simply divided the volume capacity of the ship into 50-foot diameter silos.
Grain silo ‘terminals’ line the Columbia and Snake rivers and most all the wheat grown in the PNW anywhere near the river system goes by truck to silo to barge and then out.
I look to sites that quantify grain exports and barge traffic compared to trains that haul grains.
I don’t doubt that SSA has raised the specter of grain exports if only to deflect criticism of their one-dog pony show at Cherry Point.
Find one coal port that handles grain and vice versa.
SSA hasn’t yet proved to be an honest player and that’s as frightening as any other aspect of their plan.