Wednesday 22 September 2010

We don't "do" victory

From the Washington Post's story on Mr Bob Woodward's book about Mr Barack Hussein Obama as Commander in Chief:
According to Woodward's meeting-by-meeting, memo-by-memo account of the 2009 Afghan strategy review, the president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.
It gets worse, but there aren't any surprises. Victory for this man is irrelevant; not being blamed for defeat is imperative. I said from the first that Mr Obama sees the Jihadist war as a mere distraction from his Socialist revolution and he never gave a damn about the campaigns in Iraq or Afghanistan. So long as he can't be fingered for losing the war, the whole thing can crash and burn after 2012 for all he cares–maybe even after 2 November 2010.

We'll see.

Update: The money quote:
We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever . . . we absorbed it and we are stronger.
I'm glad The One is so sanguine about the prospect. That will be a great comfort to the dead. Will someone please explain to this president in short trousers that the purpose of war is to see how many blows the enemy can take, not us?

5 comments:

jabrwok said...

Flight 93 was supposed to hit either Congress or the White House. I wonder how sanguine PBO will be if the next attack targets his temporary residence.

Brandon said...

The second quote is highly insensitive and only looks at the government's perspective. Our country didn't fall apart because of the attack so as far as the government is concerned we "absorbed" it.

This is a government serving government line of thought. The only reason they exist is to keep us safe from such attacks.

Sergej said...

I think Brandon has it exactly right.

However.

Given that warmonger/baby-eater Bush (the man has many sides, apparently) did not hold on to Iraq after crushing it militarily, I would say that we aren't looking at staying in Afghanistan indefinitely, either. Seeing as how the place is wealthy only in opium poppies and reasons to live elsewhere, if at all possible. Therefore, planning to get out is entirely appropriate. Of course, my conditions for getting out, if anyone asked me, would certainly include the word "victory".

But then the question would be, how to define victory? For all I know, and H. Husseinovich (not to defend him too much) likely does, the specific jihadniks we're looking for have moved to the lawless areas of Pakistan. If the war is to be against militant, empire-building, radical Islamin general, rather than against a particular bunch of especially bad characters, then we'd probably do well to start reducing Iran---again, not in Afghanistan. Also, we'll probably need a bigger boat.

eon said...

I don't think it would make any difference. The Self-Exalted One, like his cronies, is a product of the 1960's counterculture (second generation, in his case). He was raised in an environment of patchouli-scented anti-Westernism, in which the Enlightenment wasn't a growing and maturing of civilization, but a rejection of "authentic" values, based on mysticism and pseudoscientific (or even totally non-scientific) theories with no basis in reality.

As such, he and his consider the threat force in this war to be the "good guys"- those who represent the mystical, Eastern culture they are enamored of. Seen in this light, his behavior is, from his POV, perfectly rational. Put bluntly, he wants us to lose, and them to win, so we will be forced to return to those "authentic", mystical values.

The same phenomenon is commonplace in the "deep-ecology" movement, which dreams of forcing us into a pre-Stone Age agrarian socialist collective- with themselves in charge, permanently. Obama dreams (or maybe his father's dreams are what he's channeling) of making us a primitive culture very like the Third World, in which government has the absolute power to force the populace to live in that way, both to "Save Holy Mother Gaia" and to ensure that rule is forever in the hands of an "enlightened elite'"- like Himself.

In this context, his determination to throw in the towel is understandable. To engage the enemy, he would have to violate the anti-Western, mystical, primitivist dogmas he and his clique' have believed in literally all their lives. And that he simply will not do.

It also explains his antipathy (bordering on outright hatred) toward Israel. (As opposed to SecState Clinton, who makes no secret of her disdain for the nation.) To Him, Israel is an outpost of the "evil, cold, materialistic" West in the "mystical, spiritual, enlightened" East- which must be erased from the Earth if we are to achieve Nirvana. He just doesn't want to get his hands dirty, is all. So, he'll just sit back and let Iran achieve nuclear capability, and then let "nature take its course". (Ultra-tech in the service of mysticism he has no problem with.)

I don't think The One is a "bad" person- he's simply a deluded individual who lives in his own reality, and has surrounded himself with others who see themselves, as he does, as "philosopher-kings". And when such people are confronted by facts that conflict with their version of reality, they tend to dispose of the facts.

That is, until the facts return in a way they cannot blandly ignore. In this case, it could be in the form of a mushroom cloud somewhere they can't blame on somebody else. Which should give us pause when The One says we can "absorb" another terrorist attack.

After such an attack, He will most likely make a speech about what a "transformational figure" he is, stating that whoever did it was "justified", and calling for us to "heal". After all, his dogma demands such behavior, as such an attack would, of course, be All Our Fault.

He just shouldn't expect the American people to agree with him, is all.


clear ether

eon

Sergej said...

I think Prof. Hanson has it exactly right: Hussein Husseinovich has all the biases and attitudes of the university campus. I've been around these people for many years now. They think my politics are wrong, I think they're all quite mad (the question of Israel generally does not come up, as they know I'm Jewish). I think these people have simply spent too long living in greenhouses: no exposure to the real world. They are good for talking about classical music, or literature or poetry; they listen with interest to me telling stories from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which some of them have read, and Slovo o Polku Igoreve; they're just the thing to work in an R&D department, or for that matter, help you when you're moving. I would however, not trust them to run a lemonade stand.

Husseinovich has the attitudes without the intelligence or the scholarship. He's also got the whiny adolescent "my parents are the worstest people EVVAR!", applied to his country and its civilization, down to an art. I only pray that he won't break anything that can't be fixed. As for the rest, as he put it, we've absorbed bad things before; I hope we'll survive his presidency as well.